Jeffrey Simpson

Tumult is washing over the news media business, with staff being cast overboard as newsrooms shrink or disappear. Postmedia and some newspapers in Atlantic Canada are now publishing digital-only Monday editions. The two owners of the Toronto Star wound up in court, and then mediation, over a disagreement about the business and editorial models for a once money-spinning organization they purchased for…

Here’s an old chestnut that’s appeared in these pages before. Several people of different nationalities are asked to propose the title of a book about an elephant. The Brit replies with The Elephant’s Role in the British Empire. The French person suggests La vie amoureuse de l’éléphant. The American proposes The Elephant: An American Invention…

More than a year before the 2015 election, which delivered a Liberal majority government, I had dinner in Ottawa with Gerald Butts, a confidant of Justin Trudeau. I did not know Butts well, our previous contact having been several lunches in Toronto when he had worked for Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty. Until he left the Prime Minister’s…

John Lawrence Manion joined the federal public service in 1953 and held numerous roles until his retirement as principal of the Canadian Centre for Management Development, in 1991. Since then, the annual Manion Lecture has addressed “pressing public policy and public management issues that affect the professional roles and responsibilities of public servants in a way that challenges …