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Remembrance Day 2020
Remembrance Day 2020 will be a special one, but not in a good way. In a pandemic we will not be gathering. We will be watching services that will necessarily be sparsely attended, with participants masked and socially distanced. As important as it is to remember those who fell in our defense in the past,…
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Four Election Takeaways (Two Canadian)
Now that the US election results are known and the suspense is over, I have four takeaways, two of which derive from my Canadian perspective. Different Types of Mobilization When all votes are counted, the total presidential vote will be close to 150 million, representing a turnout rate of close to 70 percent, which is…
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Democrats: The New Silent Majority?
As of the weekend before the election, public opinion polls continue to show Biden with a lead of close to 10 percentage points in voter intentions. On the other hand, YouTube view counts still continue to show Trump with much greater social engagement. YouTube view counts are easily accessible, but they are not the entire…
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Events Through Contrasting Lenses
To borrow from (and rewrite) the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, “events are in the saddle and ride mankind.” In the US election, events are riding in two directions simultaneously because Democrats and Republicans are interpreting the same event in opposite ways. For the final time I will examine the potential of events – the proverbial…
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Does Social Media Predict Elections?
Just as students of public opinion use polling to predict elections, students of online politics use activity counts (viewcounts, likes, comments, retweets, etc.) to predict elections. The fundamental theorem of online politics is that more activity is better, and the candidate with more activity is likely to win the election. A recent article in The…
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Events and the Trump and Biden Narratives
In late August, I posted about the Trump and Biden campaign narratives, and outlined six factors (the debates, the pandemic, Trump’s taxes, never-Trump Republicans, foreign policy, domestic violence) that had the potential to disrupt their narratives. Eight weeks later – and with three weeks left in the campaign – it is useful to look back…
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The Case for Can Pol Docs
Sixty characters: that’s what WordPress, the software I use, decrees the maximum length a title should be. And 18 are already taken with “by Sandford Borins.” So I resort to well-known abbreviations. The full title of the post is “The Case for Canadian Political Documentaries.” Some of my posts in recent months and weeks have…
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My Interview with the OECD
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Observatory on Public Sector Innovation is running a major consultative exercise entitled Government After Shock, which is intended to stimulate discussion among practitioners and academics world wide about what the public sector should be doing when Covid – 19 finally ends. I gave a 20 minute interview for…
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Cultivating Morning Glories
The pandemic has led to widespread adoption of Voltaire’s advice to cultivate our gardens, figuratively or literally. Literally, I’m cultivating morning glories. I came to morning glories many years ago. For the last 30 years I’ve lived in houses with wooden fences. I’ve wanted to have a plant that adds life and colour to the…
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Lame Duck Governance
What would happen if a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada died during an election campaign? Would the Prime Minister have the right to appoint a successor? The answer to this question requires us to think about parliamentary democracy from its first principles. In parliamentary democracy the executive and the legislative branches are fused…
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City Hall: A Valentine to Public Service
In a PBS interview with Jim Lehrer, Aaron Sorkin described The West Wing as “a kind of valentine to public service. It celebrates our institutions.” Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary, City Hall, shown at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last Monday, is also a valentine to public service that celebrates city government, at least as…
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Pres. Clinton and the Quebec Referendum
It is twenty-five years ago that Canadians experienced a brief national nightmare, the campaign leading up to the October 30, 1995 Quebec Referendum on sovereignty-association. The Non (today we might call it Remain) side won by a slim margin of 1 percent, 54,000 votes out of 4.8 million cast, with an astonishing 94 percent voter…
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Canadian vs. US Political Film
Working on the chapter of Public Representations about Canadian political narratives, I’ve now come to narratives about the Canadian aspect of the 1980 Iran hostage crisis. For younger readers, the essence of the story is that when the Revolutionary Guard stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took American diplomats hostage, six escaped, were sheltered…
- 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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