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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…
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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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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…
- 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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