January 18, 2013 – MLI’s Brian Lee Crowley says the government should be “looking for a personality type and a set of intellectual skills that are not necessarily identified with a particular career path” when it comes to finding the next Bank of Canada Governor. His comments are included in an article by Bloomberg’s Greg Quinn and Andrew Mayeda and republished in Postmedia newspapers across the country, including the Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix, Regina’s Leader-Post, Windsor Star, The Province, and Canada.com). Read the article in Bloomberg here.
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External candidates vie for top bank job
Tiff Macklem ‘odds-on favourite’
By Greg Quinn And Andrew Mayeda, Bloomberg, January 18, 2013
Stephen Harper’s government will examine a broad pool of candidates to replace Mark Carney as Bank of Canada Governor, and won’t let a tight time frame deter it from looking beyond internal candidates such as Senior Deputy Governor Tiff Macklem, according to a person with knowledge of the process.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty issued a statement Wednesday saying he will be directly involved in the selection of Carney’s replacement before his June 1 departure. A second person with knowledge of the process said the comments were meant to emphasize the government’s role in choosing a new Bank of Canada chief. Both people declined to be identified because the process is private.
The government should be “looking for a personality type and a set of intellectual skills that are not necessarily identified with a particular career path,” said Brian Lee Crowley, who runs the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based independent research organization, and who helped lead a private policy forum attended by Flaherty.
The 12 outside directors on the bank’s board started the job search earlier this month, placing an advertisement in newspapers. The directors “will then recommend a roster of qualified candidates to the Minister for him to interview,” Flaherty said. While Macklem, 51, has been the unanimous choice of economists and analysts asked about the appointment, the previous two selections passed over the senior deputies who had been seen as favourites.
“You can’t rule out the two past precedents that have been set, to bypass the second-in-charge,” said Derek Holt, vice-president of economics at Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto. “Tiff Macklem is the odds-on favourite.”
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