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New Article about Investigative Journalism Films
Co-author Beth Herst and I have just published a new article about investigative journalism films in the journal Journalism Practice. The article is titled “Beyond ‘Woodstein’: Narratives of Investigative Journalism.” We identify 14 recurring structural and formal elements of a fable about investigative journalism and use the fable to analyze six diverse films produced in…
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The First Federal Election Ads: Guilt by Association
I’ve started looking at the first election ads of the two major parties, and both are using the rhetoric of guilt by association against each other. The Liberals’ “Choose Forward” ad associates Conservative leader Andrew Scheer with his predecessor Stephen Harper and his colleague Doug Ford as a practitioner of the politics of backwardness. Prime…
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Gaffes by Hillary and Amy
I’ve just read Amy Chozick’s 2018 memoir Chasing Hillary. The book is an enjoyable mixture of bildungsroman and political reportage. Chozick writes about her development as a journalist over the ten years she spent covering Hillary Clinton, first for the Wall Street Journal and then for the New York Times, and also includes reminiscences of…
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Harry the Wanderer
A few years ago when anyone in our household returned from school, errands, or shopping, we often noticed a ginger cat with tiger-like markings and a beige underbelly and the name Harry on his collar. Besides seeking our attention by rubbing against our legs and meowing, he was trying to get into the house. Never…
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Consultation without Communication
The Ford Government, as reported in the Toronto Star, is going ahead with its plan to require gasoline stations to post stickers denouncing the federal government’s carbon price by the end of August. As I discussed in my post on June 19, the Ford Government gave citizens until July 9 to comment on that initiative.…
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Protesting Gas Pump Politics
The Ford Government is getting set to roll out its controversial gas pump stickers. The stickers, like the ads it is already running on radio and television, tell us the average payment in 2022 under the federal government’s carbon price without adding that most of the payment would be rebated. To implement the sticker policy,…
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An Ambivalent Remembrance of Marty Feldstein
The recent passing of Harvard economist Martin Feldstein has led to praise from many of his students, who were quoted in the eulogy in The New York Times. Columnist Paul Krugman tweeted that “his lasting legacies will come from research — both his own, and the research environment he created for young economists.” It was…
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Doug Ford’s Battle with Business
There is an obvious contradiction when a government slaps “Open for Business” signs all over the highways while it is passing legislation that unilaterally and without compensation breaks contracts with the private sector. That is what the Ford Government did to firms that bought credits in the Wynne Government’s cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emission market and…
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Watch Great Movies. Tell your Story. Learn Management. (MGSC12)
MGSC12 (Narrative and Management) is not your typical management course. It’s based on the now well-recognized idea that telling stories is a fundamental aspect of being human, and that well-told stories can be immensely persuasive, particularly in a management context. MGSC12 begins by introducing some fundamental ideas about story-telling, such as the roles of protagonist…
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Learning Public Management Experientially (MGSC03)
Recently I was walking along Bayview near Eglinton with my teenage son. Two joggers passed by, then a few seconds later they stopped and I heard one of them call out “Professor Borins.” I turned around, he came up to me and said, “You probably don’t remember me, but I took your public management course…
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The Mixed Message Budget
Without a doubt, the most successful deficit-reduction exercise in recent Canadian history was the Chretien Government’s Program Review of 1994-97. As discussed in David Good’s magisterial study of Canadian fiscal policy, The Politics of Public Money, the program review had several important features that contributed to its success. After the Mexican currency crisis of December…
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Doug Ford’s Attack on Research
Doug Ford campaigned on the claim that Ontario’s budget could easily be balanced by finding 4 percent “efficiencies” in every government department. It turns out, of course, that the voters were sold a pig in a poke, and the budget cuts have gone far beyond easily-found efficiencies and included deep and painful program cuts. One…
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A Tale of a Tweet
In my previous post, I said that Premier Ford would be a wild card in the relationship between the universities and his government, as he could readily attack professors as elitists. We actually saw a precursor to such a political attack the day after I posted this. Here’s how it happened. On May 14, Globe…
- 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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