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Going Deep at the Sento: Travel Wisdom of a Twelve-Year-Old
When my younger son, Nathaniel, was seven years old he announced that he was starting a travel fund. All future allowance, birthday gifts, Chanukah presents, and random grandparental disbursements would be saved for his “dream trip”. And Disneyworld was emphatically not on the itinerary. Nathaniel was the only early reader I knew whose bookshelves included…
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Spotlight: Heroic but not Triumphal
I watched Spotlight, the new movie about investigative journalism, last week. It has received rave reviews and been compared to All the President’s Men, the 1976 classic movie of this genre. In Spotlight, the Boston Globe’s spotlight team of four journalists, investigates rumors of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Boston. Spotlight focuses…
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The Investigative Journalism Fable
For the last three months, the focus of my posts has been the federal election. Now that it is past, I will be writing about other topics. I’ve resumed work on my book about private sector management narratives. I’m now working on a chapter about the media. Here is a draft of a section outlining…
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Claiming Social Security: A Bureaucracy that Delivers
While an undergraduate at Harvard, for a semester or two I had a part-time job, which required me to get a Social Security number and to contribute. In addition, I was a faculty member at Northwestern University for a short time, and also contributed to Social Security. As I approached my mid-sixties, I wondered whether…
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Why Justin Trudeau Will be Prime Minister by Remembrance Day
The polls’ consensus prediction is that the Liberal Party will win the most seats in Monday’s election. It will gain seats in the Atlantic Provinces, Ontario, and the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The Conservative Party will revert to its status of a decade ago as primarily western and rural. The NDP will see the…
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Fifty Years, One Party, Three Generations
Is there a political gene? And if so, is it dominant? Observers of the current election, watching Justin Trudeau working a crowd, may be forgiven for wondering. In my case, the questions come even closer to home. Last week, I took my twelve-year-old son Nathaniel to the mass rally for Trudeau held at the Powerade…
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Actually, it is About Me
Recently I heard both Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper say, “this election isn’t about me, it’s about you.” This reminds me of the maxim that when someone says it isn’t about the money what he or she really means is it’s entirely about the money. I think the maxim applies to this election for two…
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Heroes, Fools, and Knaves: Tracking Federal Election Ads
I am using the federal election campaign to do research about the role of narrative in political advertising. With the help of a research assistant, I am preserving and coding all the ads posted by the three major parties. As of the end of September, we have 27 Conservative, 51 Liberal, and 31 NDP ads.…
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Ken Kernaghan’s Lightness of Being
As the public administration community in Canada and world-wide mourns the loss of Ken Kernaghan, I’d like to offer some recollections. I first met Ken forty years ago, and we were often in touch since then. We worked particularly closely on two co-authored books, The New Public Organization (with co-author Brian Marson), and Digital State…
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A Second Chance to Get It Right
As Canadians debate our country’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis, Globe and Mail journalist Sean Fine recently recalled the pivotal decision taken in 1979 by the Conservative government of Joe Clark to accept 50,000 Vietnamese refugees, excavating a little-known backstory that lies behind it. Fine recounts how then Deputy Minister of Immigration Jack Manion…
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What Election? Business as Usual on Canada.ca
In a post a little over a year ago, I looked at Netiquette for the 2014 Ontario election. I found that a link on Ontario.ca to the premier’s page had been deleted, that the top announcement on the premier’s page was of the election call, and that the premier’s page had been frozen. I concluded…
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(The Harper Government’s) Money Can’t Buy My Vote
It so happens that, as a suburban household with one adult working outside the home and two active children we are the Harper Government’s target voters. As such, we have received the full panoply of tax credits and payments over the last ten years. We received the Universal Child Care Benefit for our younger son…
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Stephen Harper and the Politics of Lying
Lying is sometimes a criminal offense (fraud) and sometimes not (white lies). There are many types of lies in the managerial and political world, some more acceptable than others. Steve Job’s reality distortion field was a tactic to stimulate innovation on the technological frontier: minimizing the challenges in developing a new technology and overstating the…
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Kenneth Courtis on the Harper Government’s Economic Mismanagement
Dr. Kenneth Courtis is a Canadian who has had a distinguished career as an academic, an analyst, and commentator on the global economy, particularly Asia, where he has lived for the last thirty years, as investment banker, and as an investor. He has taught at universities in Europe, the US, Asia, and was tenured professor…
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Canvassing with a Precocious Twelve-Year Old
My son Nathaniel has been getting increasingly interested in politics in the last year. He and I decided to volunteer for the campaign of Rob Oliphant, the Liberal candidate in Don Valley West. We accompanied Rob going door to door after the official opening of his volunteer office a few weeks ago. Watching Rob was a…