Ottawa's big housing plan has a roadblock: Ottawa itself

Over a 40-year-career, Leo de Bever has had a hand on the tiller inside eight financial institutions — in Canada, the U.S., Japan and Australia.

For nearly a decade, he ran the risk department at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan; he was hired to advise the Norwegians on managing their sovereign wealth; and when Alberta Investment Management corporation (AIMCo) was spun off as a Crown corporation in 2008, Leo was the guy recruited by the Alberta government to manage those sovereign wealth and pension assets.

All that experience inside the machine left him with an existential question about the machine: “How do you build innovation — and innovation incentives — into a bureaucracy?”

He’s asking that question again now, because I asked to speak to him about Mark Carney’s promise to launch Can