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‘All policy roads will travel through the budget’: new Finance DM Sabia tasked with Canada’s long-term growth agenda
By Mike Lapointe December 14, 2020
Part of Michael Sabia's job as deputy minister of Finance will be 'how to reinvigorate the economy, which has to be done in decidedly non-traditional ways,' according to former assistant deputy minister of fiscal policy and economic analysis Don Drummond.
Paul Rochon, left, deputy minister of finance since April 2014, will become a senior official at the Privy Council Office, effective Dec. 14, 2020. Michael Sabia, right, currently the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, and chair of the board of directors at the Canada Infrastructure Bank, will become the deputy minister of Finance, also effective Dec. 14, 2020. The Hill Times photographs by Andrew Meade
After more than half a decade at the helm of the Finance Department, MPs and experts are lauding outgoing deputy minister Paul Rochon’s service as a man who has “lived two years in one” throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, but with the appointment of Michael Sabia as his replacement, former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page says he will “instantly be one of the most powerful deputy ministers in the public service—first among equals with the clerk of the Privy Council.”
Mike LapointeMike Lapointe joined the The Hill Times in June 2019 and covers the federal public service, deputy ministers, the Privy Council Office, public service unions, the Phoenix pay system, the machinery of government, and the Parliament Hill media.
Follow - mlapointe@hilltimes.com
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