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Conflicting Narratives: Mulroney and Turner on Free Trade
Because my Rotman school narratives course used film as its major medium, I incorporated one clip of a visual narrative into the final exam. This year it was the heated exchange over free trade between then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Liberal leader John Turner in the party leaders’ debate in the 1988 election. The…
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Allan Blakeney’s An Honourable Calling
Earlier this week I was at former Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney’s Toronto launch of his new book An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs, published by the University of Toronto Press. Blakeney and I were co-authors of an earlier book Political Management in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1998). Here are a few impressions from the evening.…
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Yes Minister: Anatomy of Another Classic
This Eighties BBC television satire about the conflicted but codependent relationship between politics and bureaucracy over a quarter century later bears all the markers of a classic. Its DVD and paperback versions continue to sell well, many clips are available on YouTube and elsewhere, and it ranked sixth in a 2004 poll to choose Britain’s…
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Doctor Strangelove: A Classic Satire
Over the next three posts my intention is to look at three narratives, two of which have become classics and one that I predict will become a classic. The two confirmed classics are Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Doctor Strangelove and Tony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s television series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, and my…
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Fables about Transformational Teachers
There is a classic dominant fable about the transformational teacher in an urban ghetto high school. The school is failing in its mission: the students aren’t learning, but they are getting into trouble. A transformational teacher arrives on the scene and, through hard work, long hours, commitment to excellence, and empathy for the students wins…
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Dominant Fables and Counter-fables
Dominant and counter-fables are key concepts in my work on narrative, so I’d better explain them. I start my research about narrative by looking for narratives – movies, novels, plays – that deal in a serious way with organizations and leadership. That immediately rules out those where the organization is just the setting for a…
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Twelve Angry Men: Anatomy of a Classic
I recently discussed the 1957 film Twelve Angry Men in a session of my MBA Narrative and Management course dealing with decision-making in small groups. The film, adapted for the theatre in recent years, is widely regarded as a classic. The question I posed of my students is why. What makes it a classic? We…
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Bouncing the Treasury: Classic or Edgy?
In my public management course this term, I showed an episode from Yes Prime Minister and an episode from the BBC’s 2005 political satire The Thick of It, both on the topic of bouncing (i.e. outsmarting) the Treasury. The Yes Prime Minister episode “The Smokescreen” involved Prime Minister Hacker’s stratagem to overcome the Treasury’s opposition…
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Where Stimulus Packages Come From
Now that both Canada and the US have adopted economic stimulus packages – the one in the broader context of a budget, the other part of a package involving both legislation and executive orders – I want to step back a moment and look at how these packages came about and think about their implications.…
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Highway 407 East: Will they still come?
The Ontario Ministry of Transportation has announced its intention to build extend Highway 407 East to its natural terminus in Clarington, where it would like with Highway 35/115. This would achieve the government’s goal of a complete multi-lane divided highway route ringing Toronto. Highway 407 is now a privately operated toll-road, with 90 years left…
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In A Quandary about Web 2.0
Last month we witnessed a clear demonstration of the power of web 2.0 organizing. On November 16, 2008, the Ontario Government introduced a number of restrictions on young drivers, one of which would have prohibited drivers in the first year of their licence from transporting more than one unrelated teenaged passenger. Within a few days…
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Talk Politics: Honouring Bruce Doern
Last weekend, I participated in an extraordinary academic gathering in Ottawa, a conference to honour Carleton University public administration professor Bruce Doern on his retirement. In his prolific writings, he has developed what could be referred to in brief as the 5i theory of public policy, namely interplay among institutions, interests, ideas, and individuals. Doern…
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The Election Online: An Overnight Analysis
No, online politics weren’t as important in the Canadian election as they were in the Obama campaign. But US presidential campaigns, which run for almost two years, necessitate a focus on online campaigning, and Obama developed a particularly powerful model that combined a charismatic stage presence with online organizing – which I will say more…
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The Campaign Promise that Must be Broken
Breaking a campaign promise at the start of a mandate can lead to heavy and long-lived criticism. Just ask Dalton McGuinty, who, facing a large and unexpected deficit, broke his promise not to raise taxes when he took office in 2003. Whoever becomes prime minister after the October 14 election will immediately be confronted with…
- 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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