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Marc Lalonde’s Grace Under Pressure
Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure and JFK famously quoted him. Marc Lalonde showed that kind of political courage in a crisis when Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet, and indeed Canada’s survival as a nation, were under great pressure. With Lalonde’s recent passing, I think it is important to remember the crisis and Lalonde’s role in…
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Canadian Cinema’s Answer to The Social Network?
I just saw an advance screening of the Canadian film BlackBerry, hosted by the Rotman School of Management. To prepare for the film, I spent the day reading Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, from which the movie is loosely adapted. My assessments of…
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Fighting Therme Group’s Toronto Spa
Yesterday The Globe and Mail published my critique of the contracting process for Therme Group’s proposed spa at Ontario place, comparing it to the flawed privatization process for Highway 407. Today, The Star published privatization critic Linda McQuaig’s critique of the spa. She, too, discusses Highway 407. She also deals with the spa’s business model…
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Toronto’s Mayor: Fear Unites, Hope Divides
Toronto’s on my mind. First, I’m joining the debate about the Ontario Science Centre and Ontario Place with an op-ed to appear in The Globe and Mail. When it does, I’ll link it to this blog. I’m also watching the mayoral by-election. The Mainstreet Research poll conducted in mid-April gave Councillor Josh Matlow 18 percent…
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From Smooth Operator to Prof with Backstory
Varian Fry was an American journalist who led a rescue network that helped over 2000 Jewish and anti-Nazi refugees, among them many preeminent artists and intellectuals, escape Vichy France. Based in Marseilles in 1940 and 1941, Fry did this at great personal risk. His story is reasonably well-known, having been the subject of several books,…
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A Modest Proposal: Convert Queen’s Park to Housing
As part of what it called in the 2023 budget “bold, transformative action to get 1.5 million homes built by 2031,” the Ford Government is rezoning parts of the Greenbelt and converting the Ontario Science Centre site to housing. Let’s take even bolder and more transformative action by redeveloping all 50 acres of the Queen’s…
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A “Wrecking Crew” of Fabulous Musicians
Looking at the dozen recent posts listed on my website, I see a pattern. Most of them are about the depressing political realities in Toronto and Ontario: the Ford Government’s apparently successful brand of Scott Walker Republicanism, the City of Toronto’s mayoral campaign that might be following the same script, and the invasion of monster…
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Will Brad(Ford) Own the Libs?
In the aftermath of John Tory’s resignation as Mayor of Toronto, I predicted that Doug Ford and his entourage would identify and covertly support a single candidate who represents Ford Nation values and that, in contrast, numerous progressive candidates would run, thereby splitting the progressive vote. A week after the opening date for candidates to…
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Deconstructing the Ford Government Budget
Contemporary government budgets are challenging to deconstruct for several reasons. Their tone is invariably upbeat and enthusiastic. They are financially complicated, involving numerous line items on both the expenditure and revenue sides, discrepancies between previous forecasts and current results, and complex calculations of forecasts for future years. They are enormously detailed, involving hundreds of existing…
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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…
- I am Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career.
- My latest book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, co-authored with Beth Herst, was published in April 2026 by University of Toronto Press (open access).
- On this website I post blogs about politics, narrative, and my life experiences.
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