Jeffrey Simpson
Jeffrey Carl Simpson (born 1949), is a reknowned and succesful Canadian journalist. For the past 23 years he has been The Globe and Mail's national affairs columnist, and has won all three of Canada's leading literary prizes — the Governor General's Award for non-fiction book writing, the National Magazine Award for political writing, and the National Newspaper Award [1] for column writing. He has also won the Hyman Solomon Award [2] for excellence in public policy journalism. In January, 2000, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Born in New York, Simpson moved to Canada when he was 10 years old and studied at the University of Toronto Schools. He graduated from Queen's University in 1971 in History and Political Science. While at Queen's he wrote for the student newspaper The Queen's Journal, and worked for campus radio station CFRC. He won the University's Tricolour Award in his graduating year. He then went on to the London School of Economics. In 1972–1973, he worked as a Parliamentary Intern [3] in Ottawa where he worked for Ed Broadbent. A year later, he joined The Globe and Mail newspaper.
His career with the Globe began at City Hall in Toronto and with coverage of Quebec politics. In 1977, he became a member of the paper's Ottawa bureau, and eighteen months later he was named The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau chief. From 1981–1983, Simpson served as the The Globe and Mail's European correspondent based in London. He began writing his national affairs column in January, 1984.
Simpson has published five books — Discipline of Power (1980); Spoils of Power (1988); Faultines, Struggling for a Canadian Vision (1993); The Anxious Years (1996) and Star-Spangled Canadians (2000). His book, The Friendly Dictatorship: Reflections on Canadian Democracy, was published in 2001. Discipline of Power won the 1980 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. Simpson has also expressed views critical of Canada remaining a monarchy.
He has written numerous magazine articles for such publications as Saturday Night, Report on Business Magazine, the Journal of Canadian Studies and Queen's Quarterly. He has spoken at dozens of major conferences in Canada and internationally on a variety of domestic and international issues. He has also been a regular contributor to television programs in both English and French and completed a two-hour documentary for CBC to accompany his book, Star-Spangled Canadians. He has been a guest lecturer at such universities as Oxford, Edinburgh, Harvard, Princeton, Brigham Young, Johns Hopkins, Maine, California plus more than a dozen universities in Canada.
In 1993–1994, Simpson was on leave from his column as a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He has been a Skelton-Clark fellow and Brockington Visitor at Queen's University. He has also been a John V. Clyne fellow at the University of British Columbia, a distinguished visitor at the University of Alberta and a member of the Georgetown University Leadership Seminar. He has been awarded honorary doctorates of laws from the University of British Columbia and the University of Western Ontario.
Simpson has been a member of the board of trustees at Queen's University; the board of overseers at Green College, University of British Columbia; the advisory board of the Review of Constitutional Studies at the University of Alberta; the editorial board of The Queen's Quarterly, and the Canadian Consortium for Asia-Pacific Security at York University and the University of Toronto. He has been vice-chairman of the City of Ottawa Library Board.
In 2006, Simpson was awarded the Charles Lynch Award in recognition of his outstanding coverage of national issues.