-
Explaining Greenbeltgate
Let’s dub the growing scandal surrounding the Ford Government’s decision to favour certain developers’ proposals to build housing in the greenbelt surrounding Toronto Greenbeltgate. For those not familiar with the story, the Ontario Auditor-General – an official responsible to the Legislature, not to the Government – last week released a report that concluded that the…
-
Felix Mendelssohn’s Highest Note
I’m a devoted classical music listener. Despite the efforts of programmers and hosts to expand the repertoire and educate listeners like me, I confess to a preference for war-horses, especially violin and piano concerti. The latter includes the big four: Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Mendelssohn. In Mendelssohn’s (Op. 64 in E minor), the third movement…
-
Oppenheimer: Scientific Genius, Paranoid Politics
Reading a handful of top critics’ reviews of Oppenheimer, I realized that, unlike me, they are familiar with director Christopher Nolan’s entire corpus. However, many admitted that they hadn’t read Bird and Sherwin’s 1100-page American Prometheus, its 2005 source text. So after seeing the movie, I read the book, learned a lot, and satisfied myself…
-
Art and Architecture in Buffalo
This title is no oxymoron. My wife and I took a short trip to Buffalo, prompted by the scheduled mid-June opening of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s (formerly Albright-Knox Gallery) new building. It turns out that the building is slightly behind schedule; we could see a curving bridge leading to the building and its glass…
-
What Kind of Waterfront do we Want?
When I take the Toronto Island ferry the directional difference in perspectives is stark. Going to the Island, a green line of trees floats between the water and the sky. Returning to the city, a high wall of concrete disrupts the horizon and becomes dominant as the ferry pulls up the shore. These perspectives make…
-
Ontario Place: A Hill to Die On?
Two of Mayor-elect Olivia Chow’s major platform commitments are to save the Science Centre and to keep Ontario Place public. Premier Doug Ford, while congratulating Chow and looking forward to working with her, in his next breath re-affirmed his commitment to developing the Therme Spa and relocating the Science Centre to Ontario Place. Reinforcing the…
-
Doug Ford’s High-Water Mark?
Doug Ford was the luncheon speaker at the Empire Club this week. The Empire Club is always a friendly audience, with the speaker choosing a supportive introducer and interlocutor, and with no audience questions permitted. The tables at the live event are bought by the speaker’s pals. Since the onset of the pandemic, you can…
-
Testing Harper’s Conjecture
After winning a majority in the 2011 federal election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper conjectured that federal politics would eventually become a two-party system composed of a centre-right party (the Conservative Party of Canada) and a centre-left party (likely the NDP) and the Conservatives would win roughly three of every four elections. Harper’s reasoning was that…
-
Academic Festival
Cue up the Brahms, please. Academics have been my major focus this week, with Convocation (aka Commencement in the US) for the University of Toronto at Scarborough (UTSC) Management Department on Monday and the department’s end-of-year luncheon on Wednesday. Between these events, I read Henry Rosovsky’s 1990 memoir and guidebook, The University: An Owner’s Manual.…
-
Dale Eisler Explains Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan is often on my mind. In graduate school I wrote economics papers about the settling of western Canada which, along with an evocative print of a prairie town, were the topic of a post last summer. In the Nineties, I co-authored a book about public management with Allan Blakeney, who served as Saskatchewan’s premier…
-
Learning to Like Olivia Chow
My most recent blog post about the Toronto mayoral by-election concluded with a pessimistic assessment of Olivia Chow’s chances. But she is now the clear front-runner in the polls, with a lead of 10 or 15 percent over her closest rival, former Chief of Police Mark Saunders. As part of a rethink, I watched the…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
- 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.
Proudly powered by WordPress