SPECIAL REPORT - PART ONE OF TWO • PROFILE • THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN OTTAWA YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF

NOTE FROM GEORGE

This is Part One of a two-part series on Michael Sabia. Today: who he is, and why Carney chose him. Monday: what he’s actually been brought in to execute - and how it’s already unfolding.

Michael Sabia doesn’t do interviews about himself and isn’t a household name outside Ottawa and Montreal. Everything below is drawn from public record - government appointments, corporate filings, and profiles written over four decades of his career.

Meet Michael Sabia - Clerk of the Privy Council, the single most powerful bureaucrat in Canada, and the closest thing Carney’s government has to an éminence grise.

THE JOB NOBODY OUTSIDE OTTAWA UNDERSTANDS

The Clerk of the Privy Council is the top of the civil service pyramid - the person who runs the machinery of government underneath the politicians, advises the Prime Minister directly, and translates campaign promises into actual policy delivered by hundreds of thousands of federal employees. It’s a job with no election attached to it and enormous quiet reach. Carney handed it to Sabia in July 2025, pulling him out of the CEO’s chair at Hydro-Québec to do it.

A former senior government official who worked with him put it bluntly: Sabia’s job is to “kick Ottawa’s ass” - wrangle a sprawling bureaucracy into actually executing Carney’s agenda, not just manage it.

So who is this man Carney trusted with that much unelected power?

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Here’s what’s behind the wall:

- Four decades, four different worlds: the career that took him from CN Railway to Bell to a $400-billion pension fund to the seizure of Russian state assets

- The personal side almost nobody’s written about - his mother the feminist firebrand, his marriage into a former prime minister’s family, and the temperament that shapes how he actually runs things

- The other Caisse de dépôt alumnus now sitting inside Carney’s government, and why that pattern is no coincidence

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