Canada Seminar

Whomever Is Elected President, Canada Needs to Matter More for the United States

Ed Greenspon, President and CEO Public Policy Forum

Chair: Antonia Maioni, William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies and Professor of Politics, Science, and Public Policy, McGill University

In person. Light lunch available. Please register here to attend.

Before becoming President & CEO of the Public Policy Forum, Ed served as the Globe and Mail’s Editor-in-Chief, Ottawa bureau chief, European correspondent and managing editor of the Report on Business and founding editor of globeandmail.com. Ed is the author of Double Vision: The Inside Story of the Liberals in Power, which won the 1996 Douglas Purvis Award for best public policy book, and of Searching for Certainty: Inside the New Canadian Mindset. He was a winner of PPF’s Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism. In 2010, he chaired the Canadian International Council’s panel that produced a bold international policy strategy called Open Canada: A Global Positioning Strategy for a Networked Age. Ed holds a combined honours degree in journalism and political science from Carleton University and was a Commonwealth Scholar at the London School of Economics, earning an M.Sc. (Econ.) with distinction.

Abstract:

Today, Canada is heavily exposed to both the populist headwinds in U.S. politics and the emergence of more aggressive geopolitical tension. We find ourselves situated in a maelstrom arising from factors such as Russia’s war on Ukraine, China’s increasing economic and military belligerence, a rise in populist politics, the shortening of supply chains, the impacts of climate change and the energy transition, and recent advances in artificial intelligence. All this means that Canada is being drawn more deeply into the U.S. orbit just when that orbit is less stable.

Given the tight spot this leaves Canada in, the Public Policy Forum and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy are partnering on this project to inject fresh strategic policy thinking into the Canada-U.S. relationship. The core objective is to re-energize the relationship to anchor critical transactions in a strategy that is fit for 21st Century stresses and opportunities. The fundamental question we want to answer is: “How can Canada and the U.S. matter more to each other and, in doing so, matter even more to the world?” (https://ppforum.ca/project/canada-and-united-states-a-21st-century-strategy-to-matter-more/)