After weeks of attacks, the new head of La Caisse finally loses his cool
When he took over the helm of La Caisse de Dépôt six weeks ago, Michael Sabia wandered into some decidedly tricky territory fraught with Quebec’s ancient language and class hangups. Both Bernard Landry and Jacques Parizeau called it a mistake, not-so-subtlely suggesting that a Torontonian (read: non-Quebecer) shouldn’t have his paws anywhere near Quebec’s $120-billion nest egg. Yesterday, after weeks of keeping his mouth shut, Sabia unleashed—as much as accountants unleash, anyway—on Jean-Martin Aussant. The péquiste MNA questioned Sabia’s Quebecer bona fides during a parliamentary committe on La Caisse. Sabia promptly informed Aussant of his roots in Quebec—”Almost 100 years ago, my great-grandfather arrived in Montreal from Italy with nothing, nothing,” he said—and decrying, with more subtlety than Parizeau and Landry, the politicization of his mother tongue.