Bio

Born and raised in Vancouver, from a professional point of view I am a little hard to classify. Polite folks say that I am a public intellectual; the more literal-minded think of me as a public policy troublemaker. I am certainly a serial intellectual entrepreneur – I am the Managing Director of a new national think tank in Ottawa called the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. In January 2012 MLI (or ‘Emily’ to the cognoscenti) was named one of the top 5 new think tanks in the world by the Go-To Think Tank Project of the University of Pennsylvania. The Atlas Economic Research Foundation awarded our first book, The Canadian Century, the top international prize for excellence in think tank publications, the Sir Antony Fisher Award, in 2011. Also in January 2012 I was named one of the 100 most influential people in Ottawa by the sadly misinformed Hill Times.

Before I went to MLI I was the founding president of the country’s top regional think tank, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), where I remain a Senior Fellow.

I also spent a couple of years (2006-08) in Ottawa as the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at Finance Canada, meaning I was the Department of Finance’s one-man in-house think tank, policy gadfly and general pain-in-the-derrière. During this stint I was also on the Hill Times Top 100 list.

My penchant for policy commentary was further indulged during the two years I served on the Editorial Board at The Globe and Mail, where William Thorsell, the then Editor in Chief, in a fit of absent-mindedness called me “the finest writer on public policy in Canada today.”

I write a distressing amount of stuff – as one friend says, I am a “gassy bugger”. My output includes four books (Canadian Century: Moving out of America’s shadow, MLI’s first book, co-authored with my friends Jason Clemens and Niels Veldhuis, and a bestseller that has attracted a lot of attention on both sides of the border; Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values, which was released in September 2009, been through three printings and was the subject of energetic critical commentary; The Self, the Individual and the Community, Oxford University Press, 1987; The Road to Equity: Impolitic Essays, Stoddart, 1994;) and a fifth which I edited: Taking Ownership: Property Rights and Fishery Management on the Atlantic Coast, AIMS, 1996.

I have written a lot about various topics that you have to be a serious geek to be interested in: equalization, regional development, tax and fiscal policy, etc., but I also write lots about things a lot of people care about. Health care is one. I have twice won the Sir Antony Fisher Prize for excellence in think tank publications for my health care work, which helps explain how I ended up on the Alberta Premier’s Advisory Council on Health, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Galen Institute, a health policy think tank in Washington DC.

Today I write regular columns for the Ottawa Citizen and the Hill Times, while at different times in the past I have been a columnist for various newspapers in Halifax, Moncton and Montreal. I am a frequent talking head on CBC, Radio-Canada, CTV, Sun TV, TVO and many regional and local media with a frequency my tiny but vociferous band of detractors find distressing and explicable thanks only to a widespread conspiracy. I was a member of the National Political Panel on CBC Radio’s Morningside with the late Peter Gzowski.

I am a recovering academic, having been a tenured prof at Dalhousie, as well as having taught at many universities in Canada, the US, the UK and France. I elatedly gave up tenure to launch AIMS, and continue to think it was one of the best moves I ever made (the absolute best was marrying my wife Shelley). I have a jumble of letters after my name, most of which add up to degrees from McGill and the London School of Economics (including a doctorate in political economy from the latter) and a director’s certification from the Canadian Institute for Corporate Directors.

In addition, I have been constitutional advisor to the governments of Nova Scotia (Charlottetown negotiations) and Manitoba (Meech Lake negotiations) and had spells as a Salvatori Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, a diplomat for the EC (now the EU) Commission, an aid administrator for the UN in Africa, an advisor to the Quebec government on parliamentary and electoral reform and a parliamentary intern at the House of Commons in Ottawa.

Contrary to a popular misconception I am no slave to ideology, but am totally enslaved by cats, notably Mr Bits, Miss Mew and Coco Puff.

I live with my wife Shelley on the banks of the Rideau River in Manotick, just outside Ottawa.