The most intriguing bit of recent political news was that Mark Carney had been asked by then-prime minister Stephen Harper to be his finance minister in 2012. He was asked to be in Harper’s cabinet before Pierre Poilievre was.

I wrote in December that Carney would make an excellent finance minister in a Conservative government, just as Harper had put Liberal David Emerson in his cabinet in 2006, first as trade minister, before promoting him to foreign affairs. I had no idea then that Harper had already proposed that very thing.