Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks to media on the second day of the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto on Sept. 15.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
John Ibbitson is a writer, journalist and the author of The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson and the Making of Modern Canada.
Mark Carney succeeded Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister. But it feels more spiritually accurate to say that he succeeded C.D. Howe, who transformed Canada’s industry and infrastructure before, during and after the Second World War, much of it with foreign money.
Almost 70 years after Howe’s death, Mr. Carney is seeking to launch a new industrial and infrastructure revolution. Howe would understand everything the Prime Minister is attempting – and would almost certainly approve.
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The Minister of Everything, as Howe was called, started out in his prepolitical life building wheat elevators. With Canada mired in the Great Depression, he ran in the 1935 federal election, winning as a Liberal candidate in Port Arthur, Ont., part of today’s Thunder Bay.
In William Lyon Mackenzie King’s cabinet, he revolutionized transportation, establishing Trans-Canada Air Lines (the future Air Canada) and helping to create a system of national airports and navigation aids. (Howe envisioned those airports as non-profit entities; Mr. Carney is seeking to privatize investment in the operations of the Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver airports.)
During the war, Howe helped transform Canada into an industrial powerhouse, supplying the country’s army, navy and air force, while also helping to equip Allied forces. And after the war, he oversaw reconstruction, helping convert factories from making tanks to making refrigerators, while establishing veterans and their families in a new, suburban middle class.
He offered foreign investors a low-tax, loosely regulated economy that made Canada a “businessman’s country,” as Fortune put it in 1952.
And he oversaw massive postwar investments in infrastructure, including construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the TransCanada pipeline.
“Howe’s 22 years in government changed the course of his own country’s history, and radically affected the life of every Canadian in the second half of the twentieth century,” biographers Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn concluded. “His remarkable career and character are central to the story of modern Canada.”
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Though Mr. Carney has been in office less than two years, his story is no less central to our times, from small-town kid to central banker to Prime Minister during a national crisis.
The great difference between Howe’s time and ours is that the American-born businessman and politician saw the United States as a natural ally and business partner.
Mr. Carney faces a completely different situation. While Canada still seeks foreign direct investment from the United States, America can no longer be trusted as an ally, as it imposes tariffs and undermines the Western alliance it created.
Howe would have embraced Mr. Carney’s approach to that challenge: Fast-track infrastructure in order to diversify trade.
This week’s investment summit sought to catalyze $1-trillion in investment over five years for major new projects, from data centres to lithium mines. Howe preferred to seal his deals over quiet lunches at the Rideau Club, but the goals were the same.
Read the full transcript of Mark Carney’s speech at the Canada Investment Summit
Howe worked to establish the St. Lawrence Seaway; Mr. Carney is open to the proposition of expanding the port at Churchill, Man.
Howe favoured an all-Canada route for the TransCanada pipeline to protect Canadian sovereignty; Mr. Carney appears determined to expand pipeline capacity to protect Canadian sovereignty as well.
Both men had little time for parliamentary niceties. Howe’s impatience with legislatures led to the great Pipeline Debate in 1956, which contributed to the 1957 election defeat of the government of King’s successor, Louis St. Laurent – and of Howe himself, in his Port Arthur riding – to John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives.
Mr. Carney similarly seems impatient with and dismissive of parliamentary debate. Critics note that his first address to a parliament since the start of the trade war with the U.S. came in Strasbourg, rather than in Ottawa.
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Both men recruited figures from the private sector to assist in government. Howe’s famous dollar-a-year men left corporate life to help Canada mobilize industry for war production. Mr. Carney has also brought in figures with experience at the most senior levels of both the private and public sectors, such as Michael Sabia and Dominic Barton.
They even share similar weaknesses. Howe failed to understand the grievances of labour during the war, which led to strikes that threatened production. Mr. Carney appears to have misunderstood the importance of consulting First Nations before proposing infrastructure developments on traditional lands.
Most important, both men believed that government and private industry could work in synergy to galvanize large projects and energize the Canadian economy. Those synergies served Howe and Canada well in war and in the postwar peace. We will see how they serve Mr. Carney and Canada in our time.