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Thanks for your Input. We’re Ignoring It.
Out of the blue, several neighbours and I recently received a letter from the City of Toronto Planning Department. The new owners of a house very close to all of ours are intending to tear down the existing structure and replace it with something much bigger. That would require several variances from the zoning bylaws,…
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Budget Consultation Surveys: How and Why?
A few weeks ago, I criticized the Ford Government’s budget consultation survey because it made no mention of climate change, the environment, culture, and education. I contrasted it with the federal government’s survey, which had no similar bias. Out of curiosity, I asked the relevant public servant whether the Ford Government intended to publish the…
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Bureaucracy and Heroism, Two
Unlike the previous post, which was about a narrative of heroism within a bureaucracy, this post deals with a narrative of heroism thwarted by bureaucracy. This narrative is in British author and journalist Jonathan Freedland’s recent book The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World. The book is a…
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Bureaucracy and Heroism, One
Bureaucracy and heroism are a strange juxtaposition, even an oxymoron. However, the new film Living, starring Bill Nighy with a screenplay written by Kazuo Ishiguro, exemplifies a certain kind of bureaucratic heroism. A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru, Living is set in Fifties post-war England, a society in which Ishiguro sees strong similarities…
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Where There is Death, There is Hope
No, this is not a post about the afterlife or theological issues. I recall a British political writer using these words to make the point that when an office becomes vacant, there is an opportunity for someone. Google and Wikiquotes were of no help in finding this maxim, so I’m guessing it came from Richard…
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Building A Virtual Museum of Public Service
When I was scholar-in-residence in the Ontario Cabinet Office (2003-04) I took a tour of the hidden in plain sight Whitney Block Tower. The Whitney Block – original home of the entire Ontario Public Service – stands opposite Queen’s Park at the corner of Wellesley and Queen’s Park Circle. This classic modern Gothic- art deco…
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Bill Morneau’s Liberal Buzzkill
My word of the week must be “buzzkill.” My previous post was about a personal buzzkill; this one is about a buzzkill for the Justin Trudeau Government and the Liberal Party of Canada. A maxim of parliamentary government, using a football metaphor, is that there should be no daylight between the prime minister and the…
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Getting Rear-Ended is a Real Buzzkill
This post is about an unpleasant experience in our family. I waited until the story was completed, so what I wrote would be reflective rather than emotional. Just before Christmas, our car was rear-ended and there was considerable property damage, but thankfully no injuries. Wondering whether it had been totaled was a real buzzkill over…
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Time to Retire Billy Bishop (Airport)
With the City of Toronto’s lease to the Toronto Port Authority due to expire in a decade, discussions about the future of Billy Bishop Airport are intensifying. The Creative Class Group (CCG), a consultancy founded by the urban scholar Richard Florida, has just released an encomium entitled “Toronto’s Downtown Airport: A Powerful Economic Asset in…
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Doug Ford’s Phony Budget Consultation Survey
The Ford Government is now engaged in public consultation for its 2023 budget. The consultation takes three forms: in-person presentations to the legislature’s Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, traditional written submissions to the committee, and completing an online survey. The online survey is the fastest and most user-friendly. Developing surveys of this kind to…
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Crazy Old Man, With Golden Voice
“I was born like this, I had no choice, I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” As I intended, I went back to the Leonard Cohen retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario to watch the two multi-media installations, “The Offering” by Kara Blake and “Passing Through” by George Fok. To the…
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A Banana Republic with Economic WMD’s
Russia, Iran, and North Korea are now recognized as terrorist states with nuclear weapons of mass destruction. My argument in this post is that the legislated limit on the amount of debt the United States can issue has now made it a banana republic possessing weapons of economic mass destruction. I’ll begin by unpacking both…
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Minister, are We For or Against Oil Today?
Denmark’s smart young acting Arctic ambassador, recognizing the conflicting pressures on Foreign Affairs Minister Birgitte Nyborg – her party and family on one side and Greenlandic independentists and the finance ministry on the other – begins every conversation with her with this question. In season four of Borgen Birgitte Nyborg is a savvy and experienced…
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Borgen Redux: An Interim Report
If Borgen, the television/streaming drama about Danish politics were a corporation, I would have readily bought shares in it. I invested time and intellectual energy in it, using it in my graduate seminar in political science, posting a long blog about it, and discussing it in my forthcoming book about narrative and politics. When I…
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Arranging Art and Images
My posts last summer focused on my art collection. Some of the works hadn’t been hung or were hung in the wrong places. In the fall, I planned where to hang everything, and I executed my plan with the help of the Toronto-based art installation firm Artstall. Artstall does excellent work, using professional methods such…
- I am Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career.
- I continue to be engaged in research, writing, and giving professional presentations. With my co-author and spouse Beth Herst, I am completing a book on narrative and politics.
- On this website I post blogs about politics, narrative, and my life experiences.
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