And can a lifelong 'fixer' get things done? Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. Michael Sabia's sure going to do something: There's a new deputy minister at the Department of Finance, and it so happens Michael Sabia just worked for the $35-billion Canada Infrastructure Bank. But he's worked other places, too, and Paul Wells traces Sabia's trajectory from his first tour through the federal public service—did you know he was once the explainer-in-chief of Brian Mulroney's GST hike?—to the present day: What’s perhaps most pertinent, as we try to predict Sabia’s chances of actually changing things, is that this will be his third job in a year. So never mind the government—it’s fair to wonder whether Sabia himself retains the habits of sustained engagement that made him what he is today. After half a decade of advocating for a transformational infrastructure bank, he finally got his hands on the thing, and the result was $407 million for Alberta irrigation. This is probably good! Irrigation is good. But I can’t help remembering that Dominic Barton, who with Sabia once pitched the Infrastructure Bank to Morneau, liked to say it would finance projects “ you can see from the moon.” Apparently the moon got closer. Pandemic procurement: In a written question on the order paper, Tory MP Blaine Calkins asked the Liberals how many times Public Services and Procurement Canada has slapped a national security exception on contracts awarded during the pandemic. The government responded that "no identifier" in the department's centralized database tracks that data, and finding the answer would require "manual collection" of information that "is not possible" under time limits imposed on order-paper responses. File this one under: "Responses that validate questions without answering them" Why Canada's vaccine rollout won't be easy: In Maclean's year-ahead issue, Michael Fraiman explains why the eventual mass vaccination of Canadians will require a logistical miracle that involves federal and provincial governments, big pharmaceutical companies, and pharmacists and local public health officials who actually administer the inoculations. And there's one x-factor in the success of the immunization campaign: None of this will matter if Canadian institutions can’t convince the public to take the thing in the first place. Angus Reid has been tracking Canadians’ desire to get vaccinated—in July, 46 per cent of survey respondents said they’d get it ASAP, but by September that number had slipped to 39 per cent, putting early adopters at roughly the same percentage as those who say they’d rather wait. The parliamentary budget officer says the Trans-Mountain pipeline remains profitable, but its future value is "highly contingent on the climate policy stance of the federal government and on the future utilization rate of the pipeline." If Liberals implement tougher emissions-cutting measures, they could hurt the pipeline's bottom line—a perhaps inevitable consequence for a government that pledges climate action while buying a pipeline for fossil fuels. They're not the sexiest sounding documents, but Departmental Performance Reports paint a detailed picture of how federal bodies measure up to their own targets. Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos tabled this year's batch on Monday. We're digging through them as you read this. Reflexive secrecy: That's how the first report from the National Security Transparency Advisory Group characterizes the, er, openness-averse culture within Canada's intelligence agencies. The chapter title might have been inspired by longtime access-to-information advocate Dean Beeby. Few journalists have pushed more for federal transparency reform than Beeby, who way back in 2018 criticized a memo for the Prime Minister as embracing—you guessed it—"reflexive secrecy." Entering the lexicon of a government advisory group must rank pretty low on a bucket list, but it's something. Time to Beyak out? Sen. Mary-Jane McCallum tabled a motion in the Red Chamber to expel Sen. Lynn Beyak, whose suspension from Senate duties expired during the last parliamentary prorogation. McCallum wants Beyak, who once played up the positive impact of residential schools and underwent sensitivity training, gone for good. Beyak's conduct is "an egregious example of white privilege being exercised within existing colonial systems," says McCallum. “The Senate is now seized with confronting a blatant example of institutional racism within our own House." A contract for tender on the federal procurement website appears to signal that Canada Day is back in 2021. The folks at Canadian Heritage are on the hunt for crowd-control barriers for the next five July 1 celebrations in Ottawa. Crowd control assumes a crowd, which feels like a real luxury, doesn't it? —Nick Taylor-Vaisey | 