About Us

What We Do

Massey College’s Public Policy Program organizes symposia, workshops, panels and lectures in support of the College’s mission to “nourish learning and serve the public good,” and its 2020/2021 strategic priorities:

  1. Empowering the Next Generation of Thinkers
  2. Leveraging the Community for the Public Good

There are two sub-programs: 

  1. The Walter Gordon Symposia
  2. The Ethics Series

Empowering the Next Generation of Thinkers --- The annual Walter Gordon Symposium is the premier activity through which the Massey Public Policy Program engages and empowers students. The Public Policy Program collaborates with the Munk School to provide core funding and mentorship. Massey Junior Fellows and Munk School students learn to plan and manage conferences by collaborating over the symposium’s topic and format selection, budgeting and fundraising, keynote speaker and panellist selection and recruitment, marketing and communications, and event hosting.

The Public Policy Program’s next generation empowerment activities are not limited to the Walter Gordon Symposia. The program attempts to engage Massey Junior Fellows and other University of Toronto (U of T) students in all its activities. Given their academic obligations, most limit their activities to suggesting topics and helping to host events. But many volunteer as panellists at events. The Program Chair and volunteers also make time to meet with students to provide career advice and networking opportunities.

Leveraging the Community for the Public Good --- The Ethics Series is one of many vehicles by which the Public Policy Program attempts to leverage the Massey and broader community for the public good.  It is an annual series of four, one-hour long, on-line panel discussions on the ethical dimensions of topical public policy issues. Whenever it is possible, the Series Co-Chairs / Panel Moderators invite at least one Massey Junior or Senior Fellow to be one of the three panellists they interview. 

With the Ethics Series as well as its other events, the Public Policy Program:

  1. Selects keynote speakers and panels of policy researchers and practitioners from the Massey community and the broader Canadian and international communities of academia, government, business, not-for-profits, and journalism; and
  2. Tackles a wide variety of topics including food security, housing, public safety, public health, human rights, climate change, industrial / economic policy, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics, and threats to and best practices in democratic governance.

The Public Policy Program is always experimenting with new ways to engage a wider audience in Massey College’s mission to “nourish learning” for the “public good.” Today, we market our activities via a variety of traditional and new media platforms, live cast most of them, and post the recordings on YouTube for asynchronous viewing.

 

Who We Are

Massey and Munk Senior Fellow, Thomas S. (Tom) Axworthy has been the volunteer Chair of the Public Policy Program at Massey College since 2016. As such, he has been the principal fundraiser and event organizer for all its activities.

Rev. Don Gibson is a volunteer recruited by Tom Axworthy. He co-chairs and shares the hosting of Ethics Series events.

David Sloly is another of the Program Chair’s volunteer recruits. He helps organize all Public Policy Program events and mentor students involved in the annual Walter Gordon Symposia. David has also been leading a project to create a web-based archive for the Program.

 

Our History

Founders & Foundations --- Just as Canadian diplomat and philanthropist Vincent Massey was the founder and inspiration for Massey College, Walter Gordon (1906–1987), chartered accountant, businessman, royal commissioner and Minister of Finance, was the inspiration for the Public Policy Program. The Walter Gordon Symposium was created in his honour in 1990 by Master Ann Saddlemyer, with support from his family’s foundation. Like Massey, Gordon had a keen interest in “nourishing learning” to “serve the public good,” and a particular interest in protecting Canada’s cultural, intellectual, economic, and political independence. They both sought to improve the quality and impact of democratic discourse on critical issues by connecting citizens with experts via public lectures and conferences. Their common purpose and approach were clearly demonstrated in Massey’s 1933 Port Hope Conference, in Gordon’s 1960 Kingston Conference, and in their extensive philanthropic support for institutionalizing such discourse at Canadian academic institutions like Massey College. 

Informal Beginnings (1970s to 1980s) --- Walter Gordon was a Senior Fellow of Massey College from 1973 to 1978. At the suggestion of Abraham Rotstein, also a Senior Fellow at Massey, he financed a series of public lectures, the Massey College Lectures, that was the forerunner of the Walter Gordon Symposia. Organized around the theme “Beyond Industrial Growth,” the six lectures were given on Friday evenings between October 1974 and March 1975 by Charles Taylor, Vivian Rakoff, Claude Castonguay, George Grant, Maurice Lamontagne and A. W. Johnson. 

The first Master of Massey, Robertson Davies, welcomed the initiative. He told the College’s Corporation that it was a “contribution to the intellectual atmosphere of the University and if possible to that of the nation,” and that it “involved the College in a kind of political discussion especially suited to an academic institution because it was not of narrow import or partisan significance.” The lectures explored the constraints and challenges posed by population growth, technology, environmental contamination and shortages of raw materials. Rotstein arranged for the CBC to broadcast them on its Ideas series, and the University of Toronto Press published them in 1976 as “Beyond Industrial Growth.”

Formalization & Innovation (1990s to Present) --- Walter Gordon passed away in 1987. But his ideas and philanthropy continue to be a principal source of inspiration and financial support for bridges between “town and gown.” In 1989 Master Ann Saddlemyer asked Walter Gordon’s family foundation, the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, to fund an annual spring event on topical issues in Canadian public policy, to be named in his honour. The first Walter Gordon Forum on Public Policy took place on 16 May 1990, supported for its first two years by the Gordon Foundation, the Ernst and Young Charitable Trust and the McLean Foundation. 

Backed by generous grants from the Gordon Foundation, lecture series like the Walter Gordon Symposia helped keep Massey College in the forefront of policy discourse. These public events attracted prominent international thinkers like John Kenneth Galbraith. In turn, these thinkers drew the attendance of leading political actors. Pierre Trudeau, for example, attended the first forum in 1990 and returned in 1992 to hear Canadian Robertson Davies and the famous Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes discuss the topic of “An Emerging North American Culture.” At the end of 1992 the Foundation authorized a one-time grant of $100,000, on condition that the forum continue, be televised and attract further support. The forum was filmed for Rogers community channels from 1994, and its proceedings were published by the College. 

For Walter Gordon, innovation was the objective of public discourse among citizens and experts. In keeping with this, the Public Policy Program and the Walter Gordon Symposia are ever seeking better ways of supporting the College’s mission to “nourish learning” to “serve the public good” through a passion for innovation. 

One important innovation was the 2003 decision by Master John Fraser to merge the Walter Gordon Forum with the Massey/SGS Symposium, which junior fellows had organized until the School of Graduate Studies stopped funding it. The result, the Walter Gordon Massey Symposium on Public Policy, became an experiential learning and résumé-building opportunity for Massey Junior Fellows. With the Gordon Foundation’s permission, its 1992 grant now supports a symposium in which they decide upon the topic, plan the format and agenda, invite speakers, and market and host the event, with a College coordinator and the advice of Senior Fellows. The first, in March 2003, was “War and Health: The Personal and the Political,” with James Orbinski as the speaker. 

In 2009 U of T’s School of Public Policy and Governance, now part of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, became a partner, and the symposium has since been a joint venture of the School and Massey College, which share its cost. Students of both institutions plan and host the annual event, with mentorship from Senior Fellows and School faculty. 

The 2000s and 2010s saw institutional websites and social media platforms like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube become mainstream bridge building tools between the public and academia (Robertson Davies’ “town and gown”). Massey College and the Public Policy Program have experimented with all of these. 

Whereas the Program once only commissioned the taking and posting of photographs and videos online for special events, it is now the norm. The breadth of content of this website and its underlying architecture is innovative; but the Program has long been posting content to Massey College’s website, and to its Facebook, Flickr and YouTube “sites.” 

Increasingly often, the viewership of these postings is several times that of in-person attendance at the original events.

These experiments with websites and social media platforms prepared the Public Policy Program well for the cancellation of in-person events during the COVID crisis. The Program responded by initiating its online-only Ethics Series.  For a couple of years, these one-hour long, live cast events replaced all the normal in-person lectures, workshops and conferences. 

COVID faded from most people’s minds, but the Ethics Series endures with the same format. However, instead of substituting for in-person events, the Public Policy Program now uses Ethics Series events as tests for or warm-ups and follow-ups to in-person events. 

The increasing online viewership numbers, the earlier experience with posting event photos and videos online, plus the experience of live streaming the Ethics Series during COVID led to the current practice of the Program live streaming most of its events. 

There are almost certainly many more ways in which the Public Policy Program could innovate to improve its capacity to “nourish learning” to “serve the public good.” 

The only limits are funding and people to implement new ideas. 

If you are able to help with either, please reach out to us.

Tom Axworthy, Public Policy Chair, 2024