The dolt factor: smart public officials can be stupid and insensitive
The upper levels of the federal and provincial governments in this country, in my experience, are well stocked with smart, sensitive people — cabinet ministers, deputy ministers and heads of major boards and agencies. For the most part, they are informed and competent.
How then do we explain the dolt factor? How is that smart, sensitive officials suddenly start behaving like blithering idiots, acting as though they function in some parallel universe, disconnected from the reality that Canadians and their governments face in the age of COVID-19.
The latest foolish dolt is a person most Canadians had never heard of until a few days ago. He is Mark Machin, a 55-year-old British medical doctor, a graduate in surgery from Cambridge University, who converted himself into an investment banker, married an Australian woman who is the managing director of Trustbridge Partners, a private equity firm; in 2016, the federal cabinet appointed him CEO of the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), a Crown corporation.
Smart, Machin must have been to land the CPPIB gig. He’d have to be smart to run a board that manages $476 billion of Canada Pension Plan money, a fund projected to reach $1.7 trillion in 2040. Few could complain about Machin’s performance: in his five years on the job, the CPPIB has produced an annualized rate of return of 9.7 per cent — not too shabby in a time of minuscule interest rates.
Smart, agreed. Sensitive, not so much. Somehow, it escaped Machin’s notice that Canada, like other countries, is engaged in a lifeand-death struggle with a pandemic. Or that governments right across the country have been telling people to stay home until they can get vaccinated. Or that his ultimate boss, the prime minister, has been insisting that everyone avoid all non-essential travel. Or perhaps Machin was unaware that Ontario’s finance minister, Rod Phillips, had lost his job for ignoring the no-travel injunction and making a holiday trip to the Caribbean.
Now Machin has lost his — for travelling with his partner to Dubai for what he described as “deeply personal” reasons. More deeply personal, I suppose, than the reasons that thousands of rules-abiding citizens have for desperately wanting to travel to reunite with intimate partners or to visit ailing family members in other countries. And while in Dubai, Machin had the good fortune to get vaccinated for COVID — no inconvenient queueing at home.
Like Phillips and a number of others, Machin may suffer from a disease known as entitlement, a sense of being exempt from rules applied to ordinary people.
In Machin’s defence (sort of), it might be noted that he did get the pension fund out of the ugly U.S. business of private prisons and immigration detention centres, which face multiple allegations of racial discrimination and human rights abuse. “Financially risky and morally bankrupt,” was how New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer described that business as he took his city’s pension fund out of it. In 2019, the CPPIB sold its holdings in two of the biggest operators, CoreCivic and GeoGroup, and last month, U.S. President Joe Biden directed his Justice Department to discontinue the use of private prisons.
Oddly, however, another huge Canadian Crown corporation, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, known as PSP — which invests the pension contributions of federal civil servants and members of the Canadian Forces and RCMP — is going obliviously in the opposite direction. It bought 600,000 shares in CoreCivic and GeoGroup in the second half of last year.
PSP, it may be recalled, also owns 100 per cent of Revera Inc., the chain of for-profit long-term-care homes that have suffered some of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19. The Trudeau government takes the position that its pension funds make their investment decisions free from political interference.
A noble principle, perhaps, but do Canadian taxpayers, pensioners and voters really want to be associated with squeezing money from the incarceration of criminals and the care of vulnerable seniors?
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, recently retired from teaching political science at the University of Guelph. His column appears Mondays. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com.
Somehow, it escaped Mark Machin’s notice that Canada, like other countries, is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a pandemic