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The Sovereigntists Meet the Bond Vigilantes
With the prospect of a PQ Government in Quebec after next Tuesday’s election and a third referendum (a syndrome called the “neverendum”) on the horizon, I will reflect a bit on how global capital markets – the bond vigilantes – might respond. There is some relevant historical precedent. In the run-up to the too-close-to-call 1995…
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Swiss Bank Accounts or a One-Term Proposition: Attack Ads, Round Two
After some vacation time, I’m now back to the blog. The latest round in advertising for the US presidential campaign features attack ads by the Obama campaign and by Americans for Prosperity, a conservative superpac. The Obama campaign’s attack ad starts with Barack Obama’s affirmation – in his voice accompanied by his physical presence –…
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Peter Aucoin’s Yahrtzeit
Our colleague Peter Aucoin passed away on July 7, 2011, almost a year ago. Yahrtzeit is a Yiddish word meaning anniversary (literally, time of year), and Jews are obligated to observe the Yahrtzeit of the deaths of members of their immediate family (parents, siblings, children). Within Judaism, it is a way of ensuring that everyone…
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Upbeat Citigroup 200-year anniversary ad
While travelling in Australia, I repeatedly saw Citigroup’s latest advertising campaign, which readers can access on Citi’s website (citigroup.com) or its YouTube channel. The ad is intended to “change the story” – a term used cynically in the movie Wag the Dog – from Citi’s current perilous state to its glorious history. Citigroup’s precursor, the…
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Highway 407’s Unsurprising Next Step
Having co-authored a book about the history of Ontario’s 407 ETR up to 2005 and having watched its evolution since then, I feel obligated to comment on its latest development, the Ontario Government’s announcement yesterday of Highway 407’s Eastern extension. Almost everything about the announcement was predictable, and I will explain why. Given its battle…
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The First Obama Campaign Ads: Heroic Identification or Hypocrisy and Corruption?
I’ve just watched one of Obama’s first campaign ads and an attack ad sponsored by the Senate Republicans. I’ll show how both fit into my four quadrant narrative framework, and speculate about whether each will work. The Obama campaign ad is a one-minute distillation of the Obama campaign’s seventeen minute core video “The Road We’ve…
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Small-Town Computers and Big-Time Bond Defaults: Two Challenging Exam Questions
On final exams I always try to challenge students by including one or two questions that require them to apply what they have learned in new and different contexts. I had two such questions in this year’s public management class. The first began with Industry Canada’s recent termination of the Community Access Program that provided…
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Responding to the Bob Rae Attack Ads: A Teachable Moment?
In recent months, there have been two similar, but not identical, ads attacking Liberal Party leader Bob Rae. The Conservative Party’s ad (“Bob Rae wants to be prime minister”) has been broadcast, especially during sports events, and is still available on YouTube. I don’t know if the National Citizens’ Coalition’s ad (“Bob Rae is back”)…
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A Tale of Two Budgets
To prepare a briefing for my public management students about the federal and Ontario budgets, I diligently scrolled through both. Two similarities became apparent. First, both led off with good news. The federal government used the rubric of Jobs, Growth, and Long Term Prosperity, and is continuing to use the Economic Action Plan brand, over…
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Footnote: A Moral Tale in Academe
Writer-director Joseph Cedar’s Academy Award-nominated film Footnote brought to mind the Swiss director Eric Rohmer’s “moral tales”: movies in which intelligent and articulate characters confront ethical dilemmas. In Footnote, Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnick are both Talmudic scholars at The Hebrew University. The son (Uriel), a far more distinguished academic than the father (Eliezer), is selected…
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Lords on Safari: A Review of the Books used in my Capstone Strategic Management Seminar
Now that the semester is almost over, I will assess the two books I assigned in my capstone strategic management seminar for fourth year UTSC undergraduate management majors. The textbook was Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel’s Strategy Safari, 2nd edition (Financial Times Prentice Hall UK, 2009) and it was accompanied by Walter Kiechel’s…
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Severely Conservative: Simulating the Deficit Reduction Action Plan
Shortly after the 2011 election, the Harper Government established a subcommittee of the Treasury Board, tasked with making, to use Mitt Romney’s neologism, severely conservative budget cuts (up to $8 billion) in departmental base budgets. The result of their work would be called the Deficit Reduction Action Plan, thus emulating the high profile Economic Action…
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The Consequences of Speaking Truth to Power
Two recent separations of senior public servants, one a resignation and the other a dismissal, raise some important issues regarding the consequences of the key responsibility of senior public servants acting as advisors, namely speaking truth to power. In 2010, Munir Sheikh, Chief Statistician of Canada, resigned over the cancellation of the compulsory long-form census.…
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When they say it’s not about the money, what they mean is ….
Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1981 book The Soul of a New Machine and a much less heralded 2008 film Flash of Genius both raised the question of the fraught relationship between the hard work of invention and the uncertain financial rewards for inventors. Flash of Genius tells the story of Robert Kearns, a Detroit…
- 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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