Special Guest Speakers from Around the World
Sarah Birch is a Reader in Politics at the University of Essex where she has taught since 1996. Her research interests include electoral systems and electoral conduct in democratizing countries, with special emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe. Her most recent books are the co-authored volume Embodying Democracy: Electoral System Design in Post-Communist Europe, which examines the factors that influenced the choice of electoral system in eight post-communist states, and Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post-Communist Europe, which considers the effects of electoral systems on political outcomes in 22 Central and Eastern European states. She is currently working on a book on electoral integrity and malpractice in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa as well as a study of compulsory voting. Sarah is also director of the Democratic Development Unit at the University of Essex and coeditor of the British Journal of Political Science. She has undertaken election-related projects for a variety of governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, including USAID, International IDEA, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the UK Electoral Commission, and the UK-based Association of Electoral Administrators.
André Blais is professor in the Department of Political Science and research fellow with the Centre de recherche et de développement en économique at the Université de Montréal. His research interests include elections and voting behaviour, electoral rules, polls and public opinion, and methodology. He has been a co-investigator on the Canadian Election Studies since 1988. His most recent book is To Vote or Not to Vote? The Merits and Limits of Rational Choice Theory. He has published eleven other books and more than one hundred articles in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, the Revue française de science politique, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. He has recently been awarded a Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies.
Ken Carty is Professor and sometime Head of the Department of Political Science in The University of British Columbia where he currently holds the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies. A Past President of the Canadian Political Science Association, he was a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies in 2005. For over a decade he has chaired UBC Press. Carty has served as a consultant to both national and provincial Royal Commissions of Inquiry, the CBC Ombudsman, and the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada. He was appointed by the Speaker of the House of Commons to be a member of the last federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for British Columbia. During 2003-04 served as the Director of Research for the BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. Active in the community, he is Chair of the Board of Governors of the Vancouver School of Theology. Carty’s scholarship has been primarily concerned with political parties and electoral systems. He has published widely on politics in Europe, Canada and Australia. His most recent book (co-authored with Munroe Eagles, a political geographer) is Politics is Local: National Politics at the Grassroots.
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Bill Cross is associate professor of political science at Carleton University. He is a student of Canadian and comparative political parties and election campaigns. He joined Carleton after 8 years at Mount Allison University. Prior to that he was an SSHRC post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. Cross’s current research focuses on party candidate and leadership selection, youth participation in political parties and electoral system reform in Canada. His work has appeared in many academic journals. His most recent book is Political Parties, part of the Canadian Democratic Audit series. From 2003-2005 he served as Director of Research for the New Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracy. Professor Cross holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Political Science from the University of Western Ontario, a Masters degree from the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, a JD from the University of Houston Law School and a BA from the University of Waterloo.
Dianne Cunningham , a member of the Progressive Conservative party, held a seat in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1988 to 2003 and was a cabinet minister in the governments of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves. Ms. Cunningham was first elected to the Ontario legislature for the riding of London North in a 1988 by-election. She was re-elected in the 1990 provincial election. Ms. Cunningham served as her party's Deputy Leader and Caucus Whip from 1990 to 1995. She was re-elected in the 1995 provincial election, and was appointed to cabinet in the portfolios of Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and Women’s Issues. Ms. Cunningham retained these positions for the duration of the Harris government’s first term. In the provincial election of 1999, Ms. Cunningham was elected for the riding of London North Centre. Following the election, she was promoted to Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, and retained that portfolio for the next four years. She was also reappointed as Minister responsible for Women's Issues in 2001. Ms. Cunningham was appointed Director of the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management at the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business in 2004.
Dr. David Docherty is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University. David specializes in research on Canadian Parliament and comparative legislative studies. He is particularly interested in questions of representation and the legislative behaviour of elected representatives. He is the author of Mr. Smith Goes to Ottawa: Life in the House of Commons (UBC Press) and Legislatures: a democratic audit (UBC Press) and the co-editor of Reforming Parliamentary Democracies (McGill-Queen’s Press). He has written several articles and book chapters on legislative behaviour and legislatures in Canada, and frequently comments on Canadian politics in local, provincial and national media. He has regularly taught the large introductory course in political science and the second year required course in methods and statistics and lived to tell the tale.
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David Farrell graduated from the National University of Ireland, and was awarded his M.A., NUI and Ph.D. from the European University Institute. David is a member of the Advisory Board of the CSA Political Science and Government Abstracts, San Diego, as well as a member of the Advisory Council of the F. Clinton White Resource Center at the International Foundation for Election Systems in Washington, DC. He is also an academic advisor to the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Washington DC. Professor Farrell’s research is focused primarily on party politics and also on electoral systems and their consequences, which most recently included an internet survey of MEPs in the current European Parliament to examine the effects of electoral institutions on their representative roles. The results of that research will appear in David Farrell and Roger Scully, Representing Europe’s Citizens?. He has published widely on election processes and systems and democracy, and is the author of Electoral Systems: A Comparative Introduction. He edits two key journals in this field, Party Politics and Representation, and is a member of the editorial boards of International Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Marketing, and Irish Political Studies.
Joan M. Fawcett , a member of the Liberal party, held a seat in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1987 to 1995. Ms. Fawcett studied at Ottawa Teachers' College and Queen’s University in Kingston. She worked as a teacher before entering politics. Ms. Fawcett was a member of the David Peterson government following the provincial election in 1987. Ms. Fawcett was appointed Deputy Government Whip, served as chair of the Liberal rural caucus from 1988 to 1990, and was appointed parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Skills Development in 1989. She was re-elected in the 1990 election and served as the Liberal party's caucus chair from 1990 to 1992, she also held a number of critic positions.
Dr. Ivan P. Fellegi, (Statistics Canada) was appointed Chief Statistician of Canada in 1985 and has been leading since that time what is ranked by The Economist as the best statistical office in the world. He has served the Agency since 1957 in positions of increasing responsibility. He has chaired the Conference of European Statisticians of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) (1993-97). He has been President of a number of statistical bodies including the International Statistical Institute, the International Association of Survey Statisticians, and the Statistical Society of Canada. In 1978 he was seconded to the Commission on the Reorganization of the US Statistical System, established by President Carter. He has been the Chairman of the Board of Governors of Carleton University (1995-97), which conferred upon him its first Ph.D. in 1961, and is Vice Chairman of the Board of the Canadian Institute of Health Information. Dr. Fellegi holds the Order of Canada, the Outstanding Achievement Award of the Public Service of Canada, the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic, the Career Achievement Award of the Canadian Policy Research Initiative, La Médaille de la ville de Paris, Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, an Honorary Doctorate from Université de Montréal, an Honorary Doctorate from Université du Québec (Institut national de la recherche scientifique), an Honorary Doctorate of Law from Simon Fraser University, an Honorary Doctorate of Law from McMaster University and an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Carleton University. He is an Honorary Member of the International Statistical Institute and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Also in 1997, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Statistical Society of Canada and awarded the Robert Schuman medal by the European Community. He has published extensively on statistical methods, on the social and economic applications of statistics and on the successful management of statistical agencies.
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Floyd Laughren is a former parliamentarian who served in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1971 to 1998 as a member of the New Democratic Party. He was Finance Minister and Deputy Premier in the Bob Rae government. He was first elected to the Ontario legislature in the 1971 provincial election in the Sudbury-area riding of Nickel Belt. He was re-elected in 1975, 1977, 1981, 1985, 1987 and 1990. Mr. Laughren was educated at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute and York University. Before entering politics, he taught Economics at Cambrian College in Sudbury. In 1992, Mr. Laughren became the longest-serving member of the Ontario legislature. He retired in 1998, accepting an appointment from the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris to chair the Ontario Energy Board. Mr. Laughren now sits on the Board of Governors for Laurentian University. In 2001, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from that institution. In 2006, he was appointed by the Greater Sudbury mayor to chair an advisory committee to review and recommend improvements to city services in the five-year-old amalgamated city.
Dr. Larry Leduc is a Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Political Science. His research interests include: Canadian and comparative political behaviour; political parties and elections; research methods and design. He is the author of several books including The Politics of Direct Democracy; Comparing Democracies 2; and Absent Mandate, 3rd edition (1996). In addition to the books Larry’s work has also been published in chapters of various political science books and articles in scholastic journals. He has held visiting fellowships at the University of Essex, Florida State University, and the University of Amsterdam.
Louis Massicotte is Visiting Professor in Democracy and Elections at American University, Washington DC, on leave from the Department of Political Science, Université de Montreal. He has written extensively about electoral systems, and is currently working on a book on MMP systems. In recent years, he acted as technical advisor to the Quebec Minister for Electoral Reform. He co-authored Establishing the Rules of the Game. Election Laws in Democracies.
Elizabeth McLeay teaches comparative politics in the Political Science and International Relations Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She has published on the New Zealand cabinet and Parliament, electoral system reform, political representation (especially of women and Maori), and comparative public policy. She has also edited and co-edited books on New Zealand politics, including analyses of general elections. In early 2004 Elizabeth spoke at the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform; and in 2001 she was Fulbright Visiting Professor in New Zealand Studies, Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC. Elizabeth convenes the New Zealand Chapter of the Australasian Study of Parliament Group, established the New Zealand Politics Research Group, and is a former Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty.
Dr. Jennifer Smith
Dr. Jennifer Smith is chair of the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She joined the university in 1980 but prior to that she was a Parliamentary Intern in Ottawa from 1972-73 and then went to teach at Acadia University from 1978-1980. Dr. Smith has served on two electoral boundaries commissions, federally (Nova Scotia, 1986-87) and provincially (Nova Scotia, 1991-92). She worked on constitutional matters during the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional rounds. She is the author of a book on federalism and co-authored a book on responsible government. Her primary research focus is issues in comparative federalism.
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