François-Philippe Champagne overruled a decision by an independent panel tasked with determining how much Pierre Lavallée should be paid. The effect of the minister’s intervention isn’t known—the government claims it is a cabinet confidence—but Lavallée’s maximum compensation was set at $1.5 million in year one, rising to $2.8 million in year five. The news came a few hours after Conservative leader Andrew Scheer called the bank a “boondoggle in waiting,” as part of a speech about cutting federal spending. (Globe and Mail, CBC)

Talking point: The bank was given $35 billion and a mandate to build massive infrastructure projects across Canada, but it’s spent much of the past year talking about executive compensation and approving very few projects. It has so far announced just seven, totalling less than $4 billion in commitments. That falls far short of the initial grand ambitions for the bank. In August 2018, The Logic reported that a high-level government panel planned for it to bring in up to US$2.5 trillion in private-sector investments focused on projects with national scale, like doubling the flow of goods in Western Canada and slashing congestion in Canada’s biggest cities. Meanwhile, its 40 employees have an average annual salary of $392,000; at Investment Ontario, a similar organization at the provincial level, only four employees make more than $300,000 a year.