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Governing Fables is Now Available
This post is to announce the publication of my latest book, Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives. The book can be ordered from Information Age Publishing at its webpage: http://infoagepub.com/products/Governing-Fables. It can also be ordered from online booksellers such as www.amazon.com. Governing Fables advocates the importance of narrative for public servants, exemplifies it with…
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In Praise of the Indispensable “Utility” Player
— this post written jointly with my wife Beth Herst — At a time when Toronto Blue Jays fans are honoring legendary former second baseman Roberto Alomar’s induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, I’d like to celebrate two of Toronto’s so-called utility players, John McDonald and Mike McCoy. Unlike Alomar, they are…
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Heather Robertson Does it Again
Not long after my previous post, I received an email from Access Copyright (www.accesscopyright.ca) informing me that the Ontario courts have approved a settlement for Heather Robertson’s second class action on behalf of freelance writers, this one against Torstar, Rogers, the Financial Post/National Post, all other Canwest publications, and the database Proquest. After paying legal…
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Canada’s Culture War
When Stephen Harper spoke to the recent Conservative convention he asserted that conservative values are Canadian values. A majority government affords him and his followers a unique opportunity to establish those values in law and practice. While government decisions are made at the margins, if one party is in power long enough it can move…
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Will Dalton be Iggie’d?
The Ontario Conservatives have now revealed their campaign strategy, and it’s a copy of their federal cousins’ approach. Demonize the opponent. In this case, it is the advertising campaign, now widely running, to portray Premier Dalton McGuinty as “the taxman,” a politician who frequently raises taxes to pay for waste (an example given in the…
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The Best Laid Plans: A Great Satire
My research on political narrative has focused on works set in the US and UK, two countries with rich and deep traditions of political writing and film. As for political narrative about Canada, my home and native land, Gertrude Stein’s remark about Oakland seems appropriate: “there’s nothing there, there.” In the last forty years, Canada…
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The Narratives that Prevailed (and those that didn’t)
With the dust now settling, I’ll interpret the campaign from a narratological perspective. This is substantially different from the traditional electoral politics approach. In the latter, political parties are seen as dividing the electorate up into segments (“slicing and dicing”) and in their platforms proposing sets of policies to appeal to these segments. If a…
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Teflon Jack’s Narrative
When the Liberals moved non-confidence in the Harper Government, I was surprised that the NDP went along. Jack Layton was ailing, fighting prostate cancer and recovering from hip surgery. A campaign with a leader who looks tired or unwell does not often succeed. Examples that came to mind were Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H.W.…
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Allan Blakeney’s Legacy
The tributes that have been paid Allan Blakeney have focused on his achievements as minister of health when the Douglas Government introduced comprehensive public health insurance and as premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1982. Blakeney, however, had three careers, first as a public servant; then as a politician, serving as minister, MLA, Opposition Leader,…
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The Impatient Supply Sider or the Deliberative Democrat?
While there is no end to the analysis a leader’s debate could engender, I choose to focus on the narratives that Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff have used the English-language debate to convey. Both attempt to tell a story that extends into the future, namely what the country would look like with either a Harper…
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Public Service at the Front Lines: My Latest Experiences
In this post, I’m taking a break from following the federal election campaign to discuss an ongoing function of government – service delivery. It happened that that my passport, health card, driver’s license, and vehicle registration were all due for renewal this spring, which provided a good opportunity to see how both the federal and…
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Michael Ignatieff: Patriotic Story-teller or Opportunistic Visitor?
A look at the Liberals’ ads extolling, and Conservative ads attacking, Michael Ignatieff shows that narrative features significantly in both. On the Liberal side, that is to be expected from a writer-politician whose output includes biographies, novels, and history. On the Conservative side, Ignatieff’s career as public intellectual provides an extensive public record from which…
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Heroic Harper or Devious Stephen?
Now that the election has been called, here is my narratological analysis of the latest Conservative and Liberal TV ads about Stephen Harper. The key hypothesis of narratological analysis is that a message is more convincing if it presents a coherent narrative, namely a series of events unfolding over time. As the campaign itself unfolds,…
- 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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