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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…
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Don’t They Know it’s Hanukkah?
Canada was once a white Christian country that has become racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. The Prime Minister routinely recognizes diversity in the messages he posts about every religious holiday observed by Canadians. Since 2017, Canada Post, a federal government agency, has issued a stamp celebrating Hanukkah. Similarly, the UK was a white Christian country…
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Leonard Cohen at the AGO: A First View
I was just at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s exhibit Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows. It’s not quite a retrospective, a standard gallery exhibition format for visual artists. It is rather a primarily visual biography with a great deal of written memorabilia. To begin with visual impressions. The AGO’s visiting exhibit gallery is a large space.…
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Recognizing Excellence, Building Community
The Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration (CAPPA) has just announced the competition for its first-ever excellence in research award and its annual DeCelles award for excellence in teaching. What is CAPPA and why do these awards matter? As discussed in a previous post, CAPPA represents the common interests of college and university-based public…
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Alight Solutions is the Problem
This post is about a service complaint. It is directly relevant to fellow retirees at the University of Toronto, who like me must deal with a a Chicago-based company called Alight Solutions. But it is also relevant to readers who in other contexts have encountered companies with corporate cultures as dysfunctional as Alight Solutions’. First,…
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I Was Captivated
Initiating a venture is challenging but bringing it to fruition is no less so. Two months ago, I posted about the launch of the UTSC Management Department’s first Captivate digital storytelling competition. The actual competition was held a few days ago. Of the thirty students who were initially interested, ten ultimately submitted digital stories of…
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She Said: Investigative Journalism Redux
Three years ago, Beth Herst and I published an article about investigative journalism films predicting that the sheer volume of investigative journalism about the Trump Administration’s malfeasance and misfeasance would engender a renaissance of that subgenre. So far, we are wrong. However, a major new investigative journalism film, She Said, has just been released. It…
- 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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