Unaccustomed to public scrutiny, the bank and its supporters are bristling at the suggestion it has made mistakes. “That’s bull—t,” former bank governor David Dodge told CTV’s Evan Solomon when confronted with Poilievre’s comments on financial literacy. “I’m very insulted by that.” Dodge then added: “It was that judgment call in the spring of (2020) that saved us from a real depression coming out of the pandemic.”
Dodge was referring to the Bank of Canada’s decision to purchase government bonds on the secondary market, meaning assuming government debt held by private banks. This quantitative easing, which critics derisively call money printing, had the result of increasing how much money banks had access to, and could therefore lend. The policy also lowered the interest rates on loans for private borrowers, as well as the government.
In his interview, Dodge wasn’t just defending the Bank of Canada from overheated attacks by Poilievre, he was clearly trying to absolve it of responsibility for eroding the paycheques of average people, while also claiming the bank saved the country from disaster. This notion of the Bank of Canada, and only the Bank of Canada, keeping the country from economic collapse is something of a recurring theme.
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