MONTREAL — Five years ago, when we were all wearing face masks, perpetual CEO Michael Sabia went to Ottawa to serve as deputy to former finance minister Chrystia Freeland. The concerns surrounding his appointment—the ego, the alleged temper, the inability to play nice with others—were mostly for naught; rather, Sabia helped institute some of the more consequential policies of the last decade. 

Here’s a short, non-exhaustive list, according to a former senior government official who worked with him: the seizing of Russian assets after the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine; the designing and subsequent winding down of Canada’s COVID-19 relief programs; the suite of tax initiatives designed to keep Canadian investment dollars from being sucked into the vortex of then-U.S. president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. 

In 2023, Sabia shoved off to Hydro-Québec, where he soon launched a 10-year, $50-billion effort to build dams, triple wind power generation, decarbonize Quebec’s economy and export clean kilowatts abroad at great profit.

All of this is a decent indication of why Sabia is heading back to Ottawa. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Sabia’s appointment as clerk of the Privy Council, a painfully British-sounding office for the government’s number two—Michael Jordan’s Scottie Pippen, if you like, or Tony Soprano’s Silvio Dante. 

The pursuit of Sabia, as well as his appointment to the job, was hush-hush. All but a handful of Liberals were surprised, according to a Liberal who wasn’t. Yet his mandate is as clear as Crystal Pepsi: make flesh of the prime minister’s many outsized promises to effectively turn Canada into a construction site.

During the election campaign, Carney said he would smash down provincial borders, build 500,000 homes a year by 2035 and otherwise impose highways, tramways, tunnels, railroads and energy corridors onto the landscape. Doing so requires brains and elbows. Sabia—restless, peripatetic, a 71-year-old bundle of energy—carries both around, as well as a seemingly innate need to leave marks on the landscape wherever he goes.

Sabia’s career can be roughly measured in decades. In the 1990s, he aggressively culled management and workforce at Canadian National Railway, ripening the Crown corporation for privatisation. He brewed a similar cocktail of job cuts and downsizing at Bell Canada Enterprises in the 2000s, refocusing the telecom’s wandering eye on wireless telecom. 

In 2009, he nursed the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, then smarting from a failed $40-billion bet on commercial paper, back to health, in part by focusing on what he’s called “durable, sustainable, inclusive growth.” 

Sabia’s most conspicuous effort was the Réseau express métropolitain, or REM, Montreal’s light-rail system. There are asterisks attached to its success, in that it has been chronically interruption-prone as of late. Nevertheless, the 67-kilometre route was more or less on time and on budget—which, in a city where a five-kilometre stretch of Metro line was more than a year late and half billion over budget, counts as a success. “Michael’s mindset is building things. In that sense, he was different from nearly anyone else leading a pension fund at the time,” former Caisse chief economist Martin Coiteux told me.

Part of Sabia’s mantra at Hydro-Québec was the importance of Indigenous buy-in to capital projects, which will be crucial in his new Privy Council gig. Meanwhile, his take on the Trump administration’s belligerence has been decidedly non-hysterical. In a speech in February, Sabia saw business opportunities in the U.S.’s near-total abdication of the greentech space and the pivot away from oil—while Canada’s vast energy resources are both a source of wealth and an exercise in sovereignty. 

A good part of Sabia’s new job will be to wrangle Ottawa’s civil service and point it towards Carney’s priorities—“kick its ass,” as a Sabia ally recently told me. A looming trade crisis with oodles of capital and the levers of the federal government in his hands. In short, yet another ideal playground for Michael Sabia. 

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”