Dans moins de trois mois, les Libéraux de l’Ontario se choisiront un nouveau chef, et ce faisant, nommeront le prochain premier ministre de la province.

Les responsabilités d’un chef de gouvernement sont vastes et ardues. Elles exigent une rare combinaison de leadership, compétence, empathie et intégrité. Plus que ces qualités personnelles, ce sont pourtant les considérations électorales à court terme qui influenceront le plus lourdement le choix des délégués libéraux, lors du congrès de janvier.

En effet, le gouvernement minoritaire des Libéraux ne semble pas pouvoir imposer son programme politique, ce qui le forcera soit à déclencher des élections à courte échéance, soit à risquer d’être renversé par l’opposition. Le nouveau leader libéral disposera donc de peu de temps pour préparer la campagne du parti, pour se faire connaître et pour regagner le terrain perdu auprès de l’électorat.

C’est une tâche ardue. Depuis les élections d’octobre 2011, les intentions de vote pour les libéraux ont chuté de 14 points. Les Ontariens semblent avoir mal digéré les mesures d’austérité, l’incurie d’ORNGE, l’annulation onéreuse et électoraliste des centrales électriques d’Oakville et Mississauga, la confrontation avec les enseignants et la prorogation abusive et indéfinie de Queen’s Park. Face au péril et à l’urgence, les délégués libéraux se donneront d’abord un chef de guerre.

Qui a les meilleures chances de mener les troupes à la victoire? Pour l’instant, les candidats en lice sont Eric Hoskins, Gerard Kennedy, Glen Murray, Charles Sousa, Sandra Pupatello et Kathleen Wynne. Un sondage Forum Research confirme le capital de sympathie de Kennedy, obtenue lors de deux courses à la chefferie précédentes, mais la campagne permettra aux autres candidats de se mettre en valeur et la méthodologie de l’enquête ne permet pas de connaître les préférences des délégués du parti. Elle n’éclaire pas les dynamiques de coalition, d’un tour de scrutin à l’autre, lors d’un congrès à la chefferie. D’autres noms pourraient aussi surgir avant la date limite du 23 novembre. Rien n’est donc décidé.

Nous disposons quand même de certaines données pertinentes. Le politologue Éric Grenier a calculé la moyenne des derniers sondages provinciaux (pondérés selon la taille de leur échantillon), ce qui accorde 36,5 % des intentions de vote aux Conservateurs, 32,2 % aux Néo-Démocrates, 23,6  % aux Libéraux et 6,8% aux Verts.

Bien entendu, le vote populaire ne se traduit pas nécessairement en une proportion équivalent de sièges à Queen’s Park. Risquons donc une projection de siège, en ré-utilisant la méthode très rudimentaire qui nous avait permis de prédire un troisième mandat libéral (mais faiblement majoritaire, oups…) en 2011.

Le tableau vous intéressera. Si des élections avaient lieu aujourd’hui en Ontario, les Conservateurs de Tim Hudak formeraient probablement un gouvernement majoritaire, par la peau des dents, avec 55 sièges. Le NPD accèderait à l’opposition officielle (30 sièges) et les Libéraux seraient relégués au rang de tiers parti (22 sièges).

Cette polarisation droite-gauche n’est pas sans rappeler les élections fédérales de 2011, et elle a de quoi inquiéter les Grits d’ici. La personne choisie comme chef (ou cheffe) pourra-t-elle reconstruire la coalition centriste qui a permis au parti de remporter trois mandats? À courte échéance, j’en doute.

Depuis octobre 2011, chaque recul des intentions de vote libérales s’est traduit en gains équivalents pour le camp néo-démocrate, alors que les conservateurs se maintenaient. Les Libéraux de Dalton McGuinty ont donc perdu des appuis surtout chez  les électeurs de centre-gauche. Après les récentes attaques contre les syndicats et contre l’État providence, le parti ne retrouvera pas facilement la confiance de ces électeurs, même s’il devait se donner un leader plus progressiste. De plus, les appels de la gauche au vote stratégique joueront contre les libéraux cette fois-ci, puisque le NPD paraît mieux positionné pour barrer la route des Tories.

Dans ce contexte, le prochain chef libéral aura plus de chance de sauver les meubles s’il courtise l’électorat de droite et de centre-droit.  En ce sens, l’expérience de Pupatello et de Sousa au ministère du Développement économique et du Commerce et leurs liens avec la communauté d’affaire leurs confèrent peut-être un avantage sur les autres candidats.

Si la tendance se maintient, les Libéraux ont peu de chance de se maintenir ou de progresser dans le Centre, Hamilton, London, le Golden Horseshoe, le Nord, l’Ouest et le Sud-Ouest de la province. Le chef libéral idéal devrait donc être capable de séduire les Ontariens de la banlieu et de la couronne de Toronto (Ajax-Pickering, Etobicoke Centre, Etobicoke North, Mississauga-South, Mississauga-Brampton South, Pickering-Scarborough East, Richmond-Hills, Scarborough-Agincourt, Vaughan, Willowdale, York Centre) et de l’Est urbain (Kingston and the Islands, Ottawa Centre, Ottawa South). Ces circonscriptions sont importantes parce qu’elles devraient présenter des luttes bleues-rouges serrées et pourraient donc pivoter si un nouveau chef libéral campé plus à droite avait l’heur de plaire à ces électeurs. Sousa étant député de Mississauga South, il est peut-être mieux positionné que les autres candidats, au moins du point de vue géographique.

Encore une fois, gare aux «prognosticateurs». Il est encore tôt pour prédire les résultats. Ces projections sont sont beaucoup moins fiables que celles de Nate Silver, rendu célèbre pendant les présidentielles américaines, puisqu’elles sont basées sur moins de sondages et que notre système tripartiste accroît l’incertitude. Les données sont quand même utiles en ce qu’elles stimulent notre imagination et permettent de concevoir des scénarios plausibles. Le résultat plaira sans doute à Tim Hudak, peut-être à Andrea Horwath, mais pas au prochain chef libéral. Quoi qu’il en soit, nous serons fixé  le 25 janvier.

Understanding the Student Mobilization in Quebec:

What Lessons for Ontario?

DATE : November 8, 2012

TIME: 9:45 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

LOCATION: BMO Conference Centre, Glendon Hall, Glendon College, 2275 Bayview Avenue, Toronto

RSVP: events@glendon.yorku.ca

Panellists:

• Professor Pascale Dufour, Department of Political Science, University of Montreal
• Professor Ross Finnie, Graduate School of Public and International
  Affairs, University of Ottawa
• Professor Francis Garon, Glendon School of Public and International
  Affairs, Glendon College, York University
• David Macdonald, Senior Economist, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
• Professor Éric Montpetit, Department of Political Science, University of Montreal.
• Professor Miriam Smith, Department of Social Science, York University

We ought to be outraged. Just about every day our media provides a new account of the decline of our democracy:  the inadequacies of our electoral system and allegations of electoral fraud; the high-handed treatment of our Parliament through inappropriate prorogations and overuse of omnibus legislation; a government ever more authoritarian and opaque, resistant to evidence and reason, and prepared to stifle dissent.  Adding weight to the urgency of these issues is that they are being raised across the political spectrum, left, right and centre, and among critics with very different models of democracy    Even given these significant stirrings of outrage, why do so many still seem not to care? Has democracy lost some of its lustre?

Part of the answer lies in the preeminence of markets and market thinking over the last three decades.  We are not simply talking about our market economy, but more our conversion to a market society in which money can buy almost anything, we are more consumer than citizen, and inequalities and their corrosiveness grow, undermining solidarity and any sense of a common good.   With the market society comes a thinned out  “bargain basement citizenship” – Canadians expect less from their government, give less, and get less.  In this world, citizen takes a backseat to consumer/taxpayer, and democracy takes a back seat to the market. While few would be comfortable with American economist and libertarian Bryan Caplan’s statement that what we need is more market and less democracy, he captures well the bleeding of market thinking into our social and political relationships.  How did we get here?

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in what philosopher Michael Sandel calls “market triumphalism”.  The genius of market mechanisms for organizing the economy and generating prosperity held the key to the good life. The common good was no longer a matter of citizens contesting ideas or governments shaping the future; common citizenship, civic virtue, collective engagement were the old way.  The new way was to pursue our individual interests in “free and voluntary” market exchanges.

Nothing captures better the imperialism of this view than former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement that there is no such thing as society.  Only individuals and their interests and fears are real.  To the extent that one is looking for more – meaning, purpose, solidarity – that can be found in church and the communities into which we are born and which give us structure and comfort.  Government, in this view, is part of the problem unless it restricts its role to protecting the market and, inevitably, those who benefit most from it.  Caplan worries that our woeful understanding of the laws of economics – as if there were laws – makes democracy a dangerous thing.  This is just a bolder version of the worries of market fundamentalists that when we interfere with the market we jeopardize its efficiency and thereby its capacity to deliver the good life.  Those less sanguine about markets are warned about the economic imperatives in a globalized economy which, the argument goes,  severely limit the scope for government action. Less government, less taxes, more market.  Lost is the understanding that the job of democracy is to define the good life and harness market forces to shape a better future. That this market preeminence persists even after the recent financial meltdown and current meltings is testament to its powerful hold over us.

At the same time as we have taken the common good out of politics and transfered it to the market, the growing inequality of our society makes it almost impossible to imagine ever formulating a shared sense of the good life.  The very idea of the common good becomes a stretch given the profoundly different ways in which the super rich, the poor and the majority experience life.  They breathe different air and especially as social mobility dries up they lose touch with each other.  In an increasingly privatised world, they do not meet as fellow citizens.  Their kids go to different schools.  They live increasingly in different neighbourhoods.  In Canada the last place that is meant to accommodate all of us in shared experience is our public health system – and no wonder the pressure to privatize is relentless. Money always matters but in an increasingly privatised world where everything has a price, it has never mattered more.

At the top, the extraordinary gains of a small global elite have given them an outsized capacity to shape the agenda while at the same time allowing them to secede from much of society.  They need the state far less than ever before.  And even as extreme inequality undermines equality of opportunity, the myth of meritocracy emboldens many to believe that they are entitled to all they have and that their interests are best served by keeping it. Down the economic scale, just as the very rich want to see taxes cut to hold on to what they have, so too do the majority want to withhold their money from a state they no longer trust.  Even if the financial meltdown and its aftermath have shaken confidence in the promise of markets, they have not restored confidence in governments – and why should they given lost manufacturing jobs, tainted meat, deteriorating institutions, and an inability or unwillingness to tackle the big issues.  And, in a perfect self-fulfilling prophecy, taxes are cut, the state shrinks and  becomes less trustworthy, the services it provides less relevant and increasingly shoddy, and the distrust grows and curdles into cynicism about the idea of progress.

The result: a ?marketized” politics of propaganda and pandering and an impoverished democracy that treats us as consumers and taxpayers, not citizens, and prefers to obscure the issues rather than engage us in defining the kind of society we want. Interesting that our government eliminated the direct public subsidy to parties, a subsidy that made every vote count for something,  yet another demonstration that politics is a private affair.  Increasingly those who want more, who want to take their future back, are looking outside of conventional politics for expressions of the democratic spirit: to their communities, or global causes, or to the streets.  It was striking how many of the participants in the Occupy movement and the Quebec student protests found a new solidarity in their activism.  Through action together these young people are taking a shot at rebuilding civil society and rediscovering the common good.  Perhaps it is only ever from the outside that we can hope to find the answers of what kind of country and what kind of democracy we want.

So, perhaps the answer is that many Canadians  do care about democracy but many, especially young Canadians, have given up on Canadian politics and the impoverished version of democracy on offer.  That is both understandable and dangerous. The new activism and rebuilding of an independent civil society are essential but not enough.

Student leaders from Quebec have recently launched a cross-Canada tour to promote political activism, to help Canadians learn how to build social movements that offer a richer kind of democratic experience than provided by contemporary politics, but also to explain to those who feel disenfranchised why voting and political participation still matter. They understand the dangers of leaving any government to its own devices, unconstrained by a vigilant citizenry. These young Canadians seem to be looking for a new politics tuned into the voices in the community and on the streets and one that at least begins to offer some real engagement on the issues that matter – inequality and poverty, jobs and youth unemployment, climate change and environmental degradation.  And they continue to express the hope that a renewed democracy will allow us to take back our future.  It is now up to our political leadership to take up the challenge.

A shorter version of this article was first published in the Toronto Star.

Conference held at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada, September 13 and 14, 2012.

PROGRAM

Thursday, September 13

1:00   Sixty Years of European Governance  (Willem Maas)

1:15 – 3:15      Panel 1: Governance and Institutions

• Ethics and Culture in the European Commission’s Services (Michelle Cini)
• Shared Governance through Agencies of the European Union: Between Institutional Continuity and Change (Martijn L.P. Groenleer)
• The Politics of European Regulatory Governance: An Evolutionary Perspective (Sandra Eckert)
• Sixty Years of Auditing Europe   Paul Stephenson

3:30 – 5:30      Panel 2: Governance of Enlargement, Regions, and External Relations

• Growing Pains, Reform and Changing Aim of Cohesion Policy  (Carolyn Dudek)
• Decades of European Foreign Policy and Governance in the Middle East Conflict (Sharon Pardo)
• The EU External Relations Governance System (Roberto Domínguez)
• Fifty Years of Enlargement Policy (Neill Nugent)

Friday, September 14

9:00 – 10:30    Panel 3: Governance of Migration, Mobility, and Borders

• European Integration and the Governance of Mobility (Alexander Caviedes)
• European Governance and Reactive Sequencing: The Evolution of EU Asylum and Migration Cooperation (Meng-Hsuan Chou)
• European Border Policy: From Cold War Container Spaces to a Showcase of EU Governmentality? (Ulrich Best)

10:45 – 12:15 Panel 4:  Governance, Law, Crisis

• Sixty Years of EU Law: Evolution or Transformation?  (Jessica Guth)
• Fifty Years of Public (Dis-)satisfaction with European Governance  (Maurits van der Veen)
• Governance in the EU: Flexible Modes of Steering Through Stable Institutions  (Ingeborg Tömmel)

12:15 – 1:30 Lunch / conference closing

1:45 – 3:00 Publication discussion for authors

Biographical sketches and paper abstracts available HERE.

The John Howard Society of Canada, in collaboration with the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, the Canadian Bar Association, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Centre for Global Challenges, the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, and the National Associations Active in Criminal Justice presents Prison Crowding and its Implications for Human Rights.

This one-day symposium will be held on Saturday, August 25, 2012 at the University of Ottawa Campus from 8:30 am - 5:30 pm.

Registration required.

For further details click here.

These are tough days for Canada’s parliamentary democracy.  Having endured years of steady erosion, it is now under frontal attack.  Journalists and public leaders, across the political spectrum, have begun to document the injuries. We are seeing stirrings of outrage. But this assault on our democracy could not be happening without some complicity or at least indifference on our part.  How many of us are so disenchanted with government that we no longer watch what is happening in Ottawa because we no longer care?  And, in these volatile and uncertain times, how many of us are prepared to trade off a little democracy for a little certainty or a tax cut.

These Uncertain Times

These are indeed uncertain and volatile times. The space between crises seems to be getting shorter while the world seems to be stuck, in gridlock.  Economies are slowing everywhere. Our leaders are having trouble finding almost any consensus on what ails us and what needs doing. They met in Rio+20 to achieve little more than confirmation of a lack of political will. The European economy hangs precariously, while European leaders are torn between the Austerians (largely Germany) and the Krugmanians, and our own government is unprepared to do anything beyond offering what must be irksome finger-wagging lectures.

Yes Canada has weathered these storms better than many, but this is no time for self-congratulation. Inequality here is high and rising and for the first time in living memory we worry that our kids won’t have it as good as we do.   And yet we watch our governments behave as though poverty, inequality, youth unemployment, climate change and environmental degradation are not real or are somebody else’s problem. Self-imposed austerity and a growing list of trade deals do not add up to a plan for a sustainable economy. Little wonder that many are losing faith in the ability of our political institutions to grapple with the challenges.

We are living in a state of what the late American sociologist Robert Merton called anomie, when a society’s goals and means no longer serve most people.  Our model seems to be busted. Today’s problems seem more complex, unfamiliar, and our institutions seem unable to cope.

We are past the point of tinkering.  The goals that gave us shared purpose seem now out of reach, less relevant, and we have lost or are losing trust in government as a means for collective progress.

The Rise of Junk Politics and Magical Thinking

One might think or at least hope that this state of anomie would be the opportunity to re-imagine Canada, to build a new consensus about goals and means.  But things don’t seem to be working out that way.  Instead, we see heightened polarisation, indeed multiple poles, with those who have benefitted most from the current model digging in to hold on to their privilege, and those who have benefited least, fed up, looking for something new or retreating altogether from the game.

And a game it is; just as the stakes rise higher our politics sink lower.  The toxic combination of anxiety, uncertainty and a creeping ‘declinism’ leads many to want magical solutions, simplifying paradigms, or scapegoats upon whom to vent our anger.  This is the climate of culture wars where reason can look like weakness, the long-term just too far off, and collaboration takes on its ugliest meaning.

And our politicians too often feed and feed off our fears, giving us mythical wedge issues, dividing us up into categories of heroes, victims, villains and fools, providing the scapegoats depending on our appetites.  We have watched what Benjamin Demott, the American writer, has called the rise of junk politics, with its hyper-partisanship, where everything is personal, evidence and expertise are devalued, and political cooperation is off the table. Little wonder that fewer and fewer Canadians, especially young Canadians, even bother to vote.

The Search for Leadership and the Rise of Authoritarianism

Such times have never been kind to democracy, ripe as they are for more authoritarian solutions where tough leaders take charge, get things done, and crack down on those who get in the way.  Democracy always takes a hit in rocky times.

What we mean by “democracy” evolves and has, over the past decades, deepened with each generation.   It is of course about the right to vote.  For my parents, who never missed an election, voting was the key (and how disturbed they would be at the current allegations of electoral fraud).   It is also about a system that ensures fair and representative voting and that every vote counts (something our current system of first-past-the-post cannot do).

But democracy means more than voting.  It means strong institutions to hold governments to account, constrain their power in the public interest, and protect our rights and freedoms, not least the freedom of speech and the right of association. That requires an effective parliament allowed and resourced to do its job, an independent judiciary and a free press.

It means greater transparency and accountability to ensure that citizens have the information they need to participate and to make their electoral decisions.

It means strong civil society and mediating organizations that ensure a diversity of views and balance, at least to some extent, the ability of citizens to be heard. It means making every effort to limit the extent to which money shapes politics.

But democracy is a messy business and, in the current climate, when the challenges seem intractable and we worry about decay and disaster, we are at our most vulnerable to trading it away for the false and dangerous promises of certainty, for the strong hand that is ready to take charge or for the saviour whose personal qualities promise magical, transcendent solutions.

To some extent, this may also reflect a generational divide in how we think about leadership and democracy.   For many of my generation, products of the industrial age, of hierarchy and the privileges and burdens of office, leadership is not about engagement, consultation, and cooperation, it is about strength, winning, doing what it takes to get the job done.

We see this in the occasional Tom Friedman article when he talks with some envy of the Chinese oligarchy and its ability to make big decisions fast and get things done – good things like electric cars (not to mention not so good things – and Friedman scarcely does).  Closer to home, recall the nasty attack ads on Stephane ”He’s-no-leader” Dion.  This did not refer to an ethical failing on his part or, given the “green shift”, a lack of political courage.  No, this was about good old-fashioned, who’s the boss, industrial strength leadership.  And we saw this in the campaigns against coalitions and minority governments in favour of stability and “strong” leadership.

How appealing is the promise of certainty, of someone who will bring democracy to heel or somehow transcend government, of someone who, while giving lip service to democracy, is willing to sidestep or subvert its institutions to get things done. This zombie leadership dies hard even if it is increasingly out-of-place in a networked world of savvy, connected citizens.

Authoritarian leadership can work in short bursts and in emergencies but over the long-term it will inevitably do great harm. It cuts itself off from the information and diversity of views necessary for creativity.  It cuts itself off from the people it purports to serve. It divides, inevitably creating winners and losers, insiders and scapegoats.  The poorest always pay the heaviest price.  This all breeds meanness – just look at our increasingly punitive crime policies, our approach to refugees, our willingness to cut services to the most needy. But in the end we all pay a heavy price.  We are all disempowered and alienated from the common good.  Only narrow, short-term interests are served.

This zombie leadership is running headlong into the digital age where it clearly does not belong.  But it persists because it is familiar to those who hold the power and  because it soothes our anxieties, feeds our need for magic solutions and quick fixes, and allows us to surrender responsibility for an uncertain future to someone else.

The dangers it poses to democracy are heightened in a system like ours in which majority governments face few constraints. We do not have the effective, if sometimes paralyzing, checks and balances of our neighbor to the south, so that means we are more dependent on good faith and respect for the institutions and principles of democracy. That makes our democracy more fragile, more easily injured.

A New Kind Of Leadership

Of course leadership matters.   But we need a new kind of political leadership: committed to closing the gap between citizen and government; to bridging state and an independent civil society; to bridging social, generational and ideological divides. Leadership that understands that government has a positive role to play but must be balanced by engaged and informed citizens and robust civil organizations.

We need leaders who embrace the new generation of communication tools  which make  more open government feasible.  Of course that doesn’t mean tweeting one thing and doing another. And it doesn’t mean “popularism”, going after the latest trending issues and opinions.

Leadership comes with a responsibility for modeling ethical behaviour, for appealing to the best in us, for believing in our potential, for challenging us to rise above our fears and private interests.

It means wanting to know and speak the truth but understanding the dangers of certainty and the importance of evidence, expertise, and citizen engagement.  Vision is important but vision not grounded in human experience and evidence is hallucination.

And, yes, leadership sometimes means, after having taken the pulse, doing what the majority may not have chosen, taking responsibility and accepting the accountability that comes with that – but doing so with openness and transparency, explaining what the evidence says, and with the humility to adjust or even change course as the evidence requires.

How Do We Get There?

Where will the new political leadership come from?  I suppose it will only come if more ordinary Canadians, with diverse experience outside of politics, and across all the estates, are willing to step up and demand better.  How heartening for example to see David Suzuki one of the most respected – and surely the gentlest – of our leaders put himself on the line and challenge us to stop thinking about good people and bad people, “radical” environmentalists or “greedy” capitalists,  but rather recognize that the problem is with our model, a nasty version of capitalism that treats people and the natural world of which we are part as commodities to be exploited.  How heartening to see doctors fighting for the health of refugees and a group of lawyers ready to pay higher taxes for the common good.  And more and more voices are calling for an elevated politics and an enriched democracy.

We also need some of these people to enter the increasingly ugly political fray to change things from the inside.  We cannot leave politics entirely to professional politicians.

We have much to learn from young Canadians who bring new experiences, new tools and new ways of thinking to the table.  They seem less ready to trade democracy for a super-leader or saviour. Most are not looking for a tough boss or someone with all the answers.  They may share the general disdain for government, but for different reasons:  it is too opaque, too remote, too hard to penetrate and seemingly impossible to influence – too undemocratic.  They don’t want less democracy, they want more.

Yes, many have opted out of conventional politics, including voting, but they are also finding new ways to engage in public life, in their communities or internationally, and some have taken to the streets, standing outside all our conventional institutions and conventional wisdom to find something new.  They are the digital generation that can make those of us stuck in the industrial age so uncomfortable.  How the semi-leaderless Occupy Movement or the students in the streets of Montreal drove so many of us crazy.  Their leadership was emergent, fragile, shifting, in a word, democratic.  Networks and communities replaced hierarchies.  And the generational divide is exposed.  This is not the hyper-individualism or entitlement thinking that detractors claimed.  It is about rebuilding civil society from the ground up, about a new kind of solidarity and a different kind of leadership.

Finding new ways to engage and contribute, rejecting government as parent or nanny, refusing to see the state as the answer to everything – that is all part of a better future.  But to the extent that the young ignore conventional political institutions, including voting, to the extent that they do not engage with the state and try to make it better, we risk an ever-wider gap between civil society and state and a continuing erosion of our democracy.

Holding on to stale notions of leadership is dangerous but so too is disengagement.  We risk a state that becomes more and more remote and authoritarian, less and less willing or able to pursue a better future, to constrain the powerful, to listen to or help those who need government most, to solve problems that cut across our communities and the generations.

We need Canadians across the estates and  across the generations to get indignant, to get  engaged, to enter the fray, to re-imagine Canada, and to take back our democracy.

Would a stronger state be effective in preventing future financial meltdowns? What would it look like? How would it work? Watch panelists Alex Himelfarb (director of the Centre for Global Challenges), Tom Flanagan (University of Calgary), Armine Yalnizyan (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative), Toby Fyfe (editor-in-chief of the magazine Canadian Government Executive).

Conference: "The Role of the State" held at the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs, August 5-8, 2010.

Rising India: Why should we care? Watch the lecture of David Malone, the director of IDRC and former Canadian high commissioner to India.

The lecture was given at the Centre for Global Challenges, Glendon College, York University, Toronto, November 29, 2010.

Écoutez la présentation de l'économiste Pierre Fortin:  ''la récession, le changement démographique et la croissance économique : que faire maintenant ?''.

Extrait de la Conférence inaugurale du Centre sur les défis mondiaux, Collège universitaire Glendon (Université York), 24 mars 2010.

Comment expliquer les récents rapprochements politiques entre le Québec et l'Ontario? Comment se comparent les politiques publiques des deux provinces? Écoutez l'entrevue entre l'animatrice Gisèle Quenneville (TFO, émission RelieF) et Alexandre Brassard, le coordinateur du Centre sur les défis mondiaux.