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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
- 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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