The most powerful woman in Canadian banking has a corner office on the 23rd floor of a tower in Toronto’s financial district that looks as if it were furnished in one hurried trip to Ikea. To enter it, visitors first pass a large bathroom, then a spare room that lies dormant and dark—both were once part of the original office, but were amputated by her predecessor in a display of frugality. You could be forgiven, upon entering, for briefly mistaking Dickson for a college student, sitting facing the wall in a chair that’s too low, behind a no-frills desk that could have been assembled with an Allen key. There are no pictures of her two sons or her husband, no trinkets, no mess—just a squeeze bottle of Purell, a Porter Air water bottle, and a small black suitcase lying on the floor near the doorway.
Julie Dickson has kept our banks stable through one of the worse economic crises in recent history.
As the head of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions—this country’s financial regulator—Julie Dickson pulls the strings on Bay Street. She is Canada’s top cop when it comes to ensuring that financial institutions are playing it safe. She is integral to the policy that is being credited with keeping the nation afloat during a financial storm that saw banks just about everywhere else in the world pushed to the brink because they had taken on too much leverage and excessive risk. She’s a leading figure among the tiny circle of key officials who are steering the country through the crisis. And in a resolutely low-key way, Dickson is putting her stamp on Canada’s financial system. She recently put the big banks on notice that her office will be reviewing their compensation practices. She is a key participant in a high-profile global forum that is advising G7 leaders on potential reforms to the international banking system. And during recent months, she stood her ground when bank execs put pressure on her to ease restrictions on their operations.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty credits her with helping to shape public policy—and when she calls the CEOs of Canada’s big banks, they listen. “What she tends to do—and I give her extremely high marks for it—is say, ‘I’m attending all these forums around the world, and I just came back from this, and here’s the information that we’re getting,’” says one of these chief executives. “And she says, ‘Given this weather forecast, maybe you want to think about that.’” Whether she’s talking about an asset class that seems to be headed for trouble or new research on the relationship between employee bonuses and risk-taking, there’s rarely cause for the OSFI head to lay down the law. When Julie Dickson drops a hint, bank executives spring into action.
Yet, as a long-time bureaucrat largely known for keeping her head down, focusing on the details and letting others grab the spotlight, she remains an enigma to the industry, and an unknown to most Canadians.
Which is pretty much how Dickson likes it. Ask her where she’s from, and she blanches. Raise questions about the critical role she has played during the past few months of market turmoil, and she insists that the decision-making has been a team effort. But she will concede this: Her term as head of OSFI has been a wild ride—although she doesn’t phrase it quite that way. “The job has been more interesting than I anticipated,” she says, in a bit of dry understatement.
It’s early March, and Dickson is appearing as a witness at hearings of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance. Her light blond, shoulder-length hair, pearl drop earrings, and knotted blouse under a classic suit stand out in the dreary beige cell that is Room 209 of the West Block. The small clock high on the wall is permanently stuck at noon, or maybe midnight. This is Parliament Hill, where taxpayers foot the bill, and here, Dickson is the picture of poise.
