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Why Justin Trudeau Will be Prime Minister by Remembrance Day
The polls’ consensus prediction is that the Liberal Party will win the most seats in Monday’s election. It will gain seats in the Atlantic Provinces, Ontario, and the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The Conservative Party will revert to its status of a decade ago as primarily western and rural. The NDP will see the…
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Fifty Years, One Party, Three Generations
Is there a political gene? And if so, is it dominant? Observers of the current election, watching Justin Trudeau working a crowd, may be forgiven for wondering. In my case, the questions come even closer to home. Last week, I took my twelve-year-old son Nathaniel to the mass rally for Trudeau held at the Powerade…
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Heroes, Fools, and Knaves: Tracking Federal Election Ads
I am using the federal election campaign to do research about the role of narrative in political advertising. With the help of a research assistant, I am preserving and coding all the ads posted by the three major parties. As of the end of September, we have 27 Conservative, 51 Liberal, and 31 NDP ads.…
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Ken Kernaghan’s Lightness of Being
As the public administration community in Canada and world-wide mourns the loss of Ken Kernaghan, I’d like to offer some recollections. I first met Ken forty years ago, and we were often in touch since then. We worked particularly closely on two co-authored books, The New Public Organization (with co-author Brian Marson), and Digital State…
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A Second Chance to Get It Right
As Canadians debate our country’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis, Globe and Mail journalist Sean Fine recently recalled the pivotal decision taken in 1979 by the Conservative government of Joe Clark to accept 50,000 Vietnamese refugees, excavating a little-known backstory that lies behind it. Fine recounts how then Deputy Minister of Immigration Jack Manion…
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(The Harper Government’s) Money Can’t Buy My Vote
It so happens that, as a suburban household with one adult working outside the home and two active children we are the Harper Government’s target voters. As such, we have received the full panoply of tax credits and payments over the last ten years. We received the Universal Child Care Benefit for our younger son…
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Stephen Harper and the Politics of Lying
Lying is sometimes a criminal offense (fraud) and sometimes not (white lies). There are many types of lies in the managerial and political world, some more acceptable than others. Steve Job’s reality distortion field was a tactic to stimulate innovation on the technological frontier: minimizing the challenges in developing a new technology and overstating the…
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Kenneth Courtis on the Harper Government’s Economic Mismanagement
Dr. Kenneth Courtis is a Canadian who has had a distinguished career as an academic, an analyst, and commentator on the global economy, particularly Asia, where he has lived for the last thirty years, as investment banker, and as an investor. He has taught at universities in Europe, the US, Asia, and was tenured professor…
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Canvassing with a Precocious Twelve-Year Old
My son Nathaniel has been getting increasingly interested in politics in the last year. He and I decided to volunteer for the campaign of Rob Oliphant, the Liberal candidate in Don Valley West. We accompanied Rob going door to door after the official opening of his volunteer office a few weeks ago. Watching Rob was a…
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Visiting Japan with Nathaniel
Last fall, our eleven year old son Nathaniel approached me with a proposition. He had been saving his allowance and gifts for several years and was willing to put all the money towards a visit to Asia. I chose Japan because I liked it when I had first visited several decades ago, because there would…
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Questions I would have Asked Richard Suzman
Recently I saw a lengthy obituary in The New York Times for Richard Suzman. I remembered meeting him four decades ago when he was a teaching fellow in Harvard’s undergraduate social studies program and I was a sophomore. His specialty was Freud, the thinker with whom the students were least familiar. He generously offered an…
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Public Management and/or Political Messaging
Two weeks ago I received an envelope from the Canada Revenue Agency that, surprisingly, was full of good news. First, it contained a letter from the Tax Centre that handles our returns listing the names and birthdates of our two children under the age of 18 on whose behalf my wife will be receiving the…
- 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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