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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,…
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Energy Choices after Fukushima
I have been thinking about energy policy – a field in which I claim no expertise – as the ongoing catastrophe unfolds at the Fukushima nuclear reactor. The quandary is that, as Jeff Sommer argues in an article in the New York Times on Sunday March 20 entitled “A Crisis that Markets Can’t Grasp,” markets…
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If he says you’re fat, you say he’s bald
This was a political maxim Liberal strategist Jim Coutts told my public management class on a visit several years ago. Tit for tat. Continuing from last week’s post, this is not the strategy the Liberals are following as they choose not to respond to the Conservatives’ attack ads. Perhaps they simply don’t have the money…
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The Narrative Model Applied to Federal Politics
In an excellent column on March 5, The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson critiqued the federal Conservative’s attack ads by showing how Stephen Harper’s policy positions on health insurance, bilingualism, regional development, and proportional representation have changed, and then asking “what if the PM’s previous views were used against him?” I will put Simpson’s point…
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Why Did Three Management Narratives Win Oscars?
It is unusual for three management narratives – The King’s Speech, The Social Network, and Inside Job – to win Academy Awards in one year. Why did they win, and does three wins in one year represent something more than serendipity? Two of the three movies are products of the times. Inside Job dealt with…
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“Making Narrative Count” Now Available Online
My article “Making Narrative Count: A Narratological Approach to Public Management Innovation” has now been published by the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the top-ranked public administration journal. Here is an abstract of the article: Though the use of narrative has become widespread through many disciplines, it has yet to establish a strong…
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Sunnybrook Tells its Story
Toronto narratologists certainly must be noticing Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre’s narrative-based fund-raising campaign. You can see the ads on television, on radio, in print, and, if you’ve missed them in the media, on the Sunnybrook Foundation’s website (http://sunnybrook.ca/foundation/). Sunnybrook, located in the Don Valley in suburban Toronto, was established as a veterans’ hospital after World…
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Bertie’s Stammer or The King’s Speech ?
In my study of management and narrative, I occasionally confront a work that challenges the genre’s boundaries. So is The King’s Speech in or out? Is it primarily a buddy story and a therapeutic saga rather than a political or managerial story? Anticipating that to be the case, I concentrated recently on overtly managerial movies…
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My Common Ground with John Boehner
At first glance, Republican House leader John Boehner, the chain-smoking “congressman from K Street,” didn’t appear to be the sort of person I could in any way identify with. But, reading Peter Boyer’s profile of him in The New Yorker of last December 13, I recognized something in common in our family backgrounds. Like my…
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Do the Nation’s Media Have Any Place in the Bedrooms of its Politicians?
A comment on my post about Eliot Spitzer asked about the role the media play in disseminating stories about the personal lives of its politicians, and suggested that the Canadian media are less likely to do so than the American media. I think the point is well-taken, and have some suggestions why this may be…
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Michael Robinson, Artist in Glass
While visiting the Whetung Ojibway Arts and Crafts Gallery last week, I learned that the Metis artist Michael Robinson died last summer at the untimely age of 62. I never met him, but I mourn his passing. I had the good fortune to discover his glass sculptures at Whetung’s thirty years ago. As I understand…
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Eliot Spitzer and the Politics of Sex
The protagonist in C.P. Snow’s novel Corridors of Power, a politician who is having an affair, quotes an old Anglican Church maxim, “You can get away with unorthodox behavior. Or you can get away with unorthodox doctrine. But you can’t get away with both of them at the same time.” That, in a nutshell, explains…
- 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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