OTTAWA – Mark Carney says he owes former Finance Minister Jim Flaherty a great deal of gratitude and a great debt.
“I respected him enormously… but also in many ways he was a mentor to me and I never forgot that he appointed me Governor of the Bank of Canada,” said Carney, now Governor of the Bank of England. “He was the one I spoke to about moving to my current position and he supported me all the way in that.”
“I’m very grateful for everything he did for me, and I owe him a great debt,” said Carney in an interview on The West Block with Tom Clark.
Jim Flaherty passed away suddenly Thursday, in Ottawa, from an apparent heart attack.
Carney first worked with Flaherty, in Ontario’s provincial government, when Flaherty was the provincial finance minister. After their careers took separate paths, the two again worked together in Ottawa. First with Flaherty as finance minister and Carney serving as a senior associate deputy minister. After Flaherty appointed Carney Governor of the Bank of Canada, their work relationship deepened and Carney had a front row seat to Flaherty’s politics and priorities.
“He always went back to the basics, so if it was internationally, or in the US, here in Canada. The need for sound banks, he was always on the Europeans, rightly so to fix their banks,” said Carney reflecting on Flaherty’s working style. “He believed in sound money and he believed in balanced budgets, and he was ready to take the tough decisions in order to get there.”
Carney and Flaherty steered Canada’s economic ship together through the rough waters of the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed. But Carney says despite the pressures of the job, Flaherty always had time for those around him.
“He remained grounded and that’s what made him effective and that’s why he had time for me when I was starting out, time for his staffers, time for people he’d meet on the street, and thought of Canadians across all walks of life and that’s all you can ask and more.”
In working so closely together, Carney says he also got to know the man behind the politician and remembers Flaherty as a “lovely human being, you know loved to laugh, loved a good argument, respected people, and cared for people, and I saw all sides of that.”
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