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Who Would Write for Wikipedia?
My Experience In a recent post, I discussed commonalities among my five most popular blog posts in the last five years. Noting that one had been referenced in Wikipedia, I came up with the idea of adding content to the Wikipedia entries on topics I had written about, with links back to my blog posts…
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Les Rose: My Father’s Violence
I concluded a recent blog post arguing that “Canadian culture and politics need more Canadian political documentary.” An immediate example of what I am looking for is Felix Rose’s documentary Les Rose (The Rose Family). Supported by the National Film Board of Canada, it represents Rose’s attempt to come to terms with his family legacy,…
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Trump, Reelected, Targets Canada
Now that I have your attention, I’ll explain. I always included a crisis management exercise in my public management course, in which I presented the students with a challenging but plausible future scenario and asked them, assuming the role of the relevant government, to devise an action plan. The Scenario and Assignment Last spring, shortly…
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Peter Morgan’s Gloriana
There has been considerable discussion about the ways in which the fourth season of showrunner Peter Morgan’s The Crown takes liberties with the historical record, most notably Hugh Vickers’s The Crown Dissected. Any discussion of departures from the historical record is incomplete unless it explains why the creators made their narrative choices and outlines the…
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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…
- 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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