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Remembering Masahiro Horie
A decade ago I was reading an article in The New York Times about the Japanese Government’s attempts to avert a meltdown of the reactors in the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. One of the experts quoted was Masahiro Horie, then dean of international affairs at Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). The name…
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Getting and Spending the Refund Cheque
When I wrote my blog post about the Ontario licence plate fee refund, the cheque was in the mail. Last Monday it arrived. Studying it carefully revealed a few things about how this goodie was implemented. Doing the Math The covering letter says that the “cheque refunds your licence plate renewal fees from March 2020…
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Selling Your Vote? Ford’s Buying
One of the major pre-election goodies the Ford Government has recently rolled out is free auto licence plate renewals, which will save drivers in southern Ontario an annual fee of $120 (and drivers in northern Ontario $60) and cost the Treasury approximately $1 billion. There is more than meets the eye here. How it Works…
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Learning Spanish Painlessly
I confess to spending too much of my time doom-scrolling, but there is so much to doom-scroll about: the pandemic, then the trucker protest, and now the war in Ukraine. And my blogs are often an extension of my doom-scrolling, attempting to come to terms with the bad news by trying to look behind the…
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Russian Exposure
When I taught public management, I always devoted a session to crisis management, which gave me an opportunity to concoct a plausible military, economic, environmental, or epidemiological crisis scenario. When the Eurozone seemed on the brink of dissolution, I imagined that Spain announced on New Year’s Eve that it was leaving, creating its own currency…
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Rigoletto in a Time of War
In a time of crisis and war, I often feel compelled to blog about the stories making headlines. I’ve written several posts about the Freedom Convoy, whose fifteen minutes are now up. The Ukraine war will be with us for as long as it takes the Russians to pound Ukrainian cities into submission or the…
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Putin, Time’s Up
Whatever the eventual military outcome, the invasion of Ukraine is a disaster for Russia. It has already incurred substantial military losses. If the Russians conquer the Ukrainian cities, the cost of holding them will escalate, with a guerilla/resistance movement continuing to fight using an abundant supply of arms from the EU and NATO countries. Ukraine…
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Doug Ford’s Latest Election Ad
The Ontario election is just over three months away and the campaign hasn’t officially started. But Doug Ford has already started advertising. You won’t see his name or the PC Party on the ad, but it walks and talks like an election ad. It is titled “Ontario is Getting Stronger” and it is being shown…
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At the Primal Scene
A late middle-aged mom is having tea with her adult daughter in the parents’ living room. We glimpse the father for a second, walking awkwardly. The daughter asks, “what’s wrong with dad?” The mom replies, “he threw his back out yesterday.” “I think it’s time you and dad moved to a smaller place. I bet…
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The Awesome Weapons of Office
The legendary Canadian documentarist Donald Brittain referred to the election of the Parti Quebecois in 1976 as giving Rene Levesque “the awesome weapons of office.” That phrase comes to mind today. The invoking of the Emergencies Act is intended to give the federal government additional weapons of office to end the insurrection in Ottawa. Does…
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Slow Boring of Hard Boards
Recalling Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, it is instructive to begin with the two major crises faced by Pierre Trudeau. One, the October Crisis, is well known, but the other, the pilots’ strike of 1976, is almost forgotten. The Trudeau Government treated the kidnapping of British diplomat…
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The Whole World is Watching
“The Whole World is Watching” was a rallying-cry used by anti-Vietnam War protesters to shame American police and military who were violently suppressing demonstrations. But it now fits the situation in which Canadians find ourselves. What the world has recently seen of Canada in stories that have received international attention is not how we would…
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How to Take Back Ottawa
One component of my public management course was a crisis management simulation. I would imagine a crisis and write a one-page scenario. I would distribute the scenario to the students at the start of class, choose a small crisis management team, and ask the team to lead a discussion. This year’s crisis requires no imagination;…
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Candidate Vetting: Then and Now
This will be the last in the series of posts dealing with my relationship with Joe Clark. It deals with vetting candidates for Parliament. The Background In a 1977 by-election in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne, the local riding association nominated Roger Delorme, a local broadcaster. It turned out – and this was known before…
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The PCP/CPC Caucus under Clark and O’Toole
The Progressive Conservative Party, now Conservative Party of Canada, with its history of mainly being in opposition, has been plagued with caucus fractiousness. In the current session of Parliament, the Conservatives have been able to speak with one voice about ending conversion therapy, but are divided about many other issues, most notably vaccine mandates. Reviewing…
- 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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