Annamie Paul

Annamie is a lawyer, international affairs professional, social entrepreneur, the newly-elected leader of the Green Party of Canada.  She holds a Master of Public Affairs from Princeton University, and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ottawa.  She has worked in diverse roles, in global conflict prevention, the International Criminal Court and Canada’s Mission to the EU.  Annamie has founded two social non-profits and has launched and supported non-partisan organizations that have helped women and minorities to enter Canadian politics.  She has also served on the Board and advised a number of NGOs, including the Climate Infrastructure Partnership (CLIP), Higher Education Alliance for Refugees (HEAR), Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and Operation Black Vote Canada (OBVC).

Anne Golden

Anne Golden, PhD, C.M., served as President and CEO of The Conference Board of Canada from 2001 to 2012. Previously, she was President of the United Way of Greater Toronto for 14 years. She earned national profile for her reports on Homelessness, the Future of the Greater Toronto Area, and most recently Ontario’s Transit Investment Strategy. Dr. Golden was appointed to the Order of Canada (2003) and the Order of Ontario (2013) and is the recipient of eight honorary doctorates and numerous awards, including the Canadian Urban Institute’s Jane Jacobs Lifetime Achievement award.

Brian Kelcey

Brian Kelcey is an urban public policy consultant. He previously served in government as budget advisor to the Mayor of Winnipeg, and as a senior political advisor in four minister's offices, including Intergovernmental Affairs and Transportation, at Queen's Park.  His most recent articles on city politics have been published in Spacing, the Globe & Mail and Maclean's, and he worked from 2018-2020 as VP Policy and Public Affairs for the Toronto Region Board of Trade, Canada's largest urban business organization.  He taught two classes as a guest instructor in city politics at the University of Winnipeg, and he has been invited to be a guest instructor at the U of T for the Winter 2021 session.

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh is a human rights advocate, city builder, feminist and former city councillor.  Ceta worked at Toronto City Hall from 1981 to retirement in 2010 as the corporate manager of diversity and human rights where she introduced many policies aimed at making the City a social justice leader.  In 2014, she was appointed as a City Councillor to fill a vacancy.  In addition, she is and has been a university lecturer, author, community organizer and a volunteer board member in the non-profit sector.  In 1967, Ceta’s family moved from Trinidad and Tobago to Toronto where she attended high school and the University of Toronto.

Enid Slack

Enid Slack is the Director of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance (IMFG) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She has written extensively on property taxes, intergovernmental transfers, financing municipal infrastructure, metropolitan governance, and municipal boundary restructuring. Enid has chaired or been a member of numerous panels and commissions, including the Who Does What Panel in Ontario and the City of Vancouver’s Property Tax Policy Review Commission. She consults widely on municipal finance and governance issues with governments and international agencies. In 2012, she was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for her work on cities.

Claire Kane Boychuk

Claire K. Boychuk is Advisor to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Legal Defense Fund and a manager on FCM’s policy team.  A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, McGill’s Faculty of Law, and former Federal Court clerk, she brings a legal lens to questions of municipal finance and autonomy. In her work with the Legal Defense Fund, Claire supports FCM’s appellate-level interventions in cases where municipal rights are at issue.  Claire’s previous research and writing has looked at a range of issues, including spatial-statistical modelling of voter preference in Toronto, disability rights in Canadian immigration law, and the application of privacy law to parliamentary affairs.

Graham Fox

Graham Fox is President and CEO of the Institute for Research on Public Policy. A policy entrepreneur, Graham’s research interests include parliamentary reform, democratic renewal, citizen engagement and federalism. Prior to joining the IRPP in 2011, he spent over a decade working in Canadian federal politics, as chief of staff to the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark, senior advisor to parliamentarians and a government relations practitioner. He holds an undergraduate degree in history from Queen’s University, where he was a Loran scholar, and a master’s degree in political science from the London School of Economics. A frequent media analyst, he is co-editor, with Jennifer Ditchburn, of The Harper Factor (2016), an analysis of the policy impact of Canada’s 22nd prime minister.

Geoff Cape

Geoff Cape (BA, MM, CM) is the founder and CEO at Evergreen, a national organization focused on innovation and sustainable urban challenges. With experience in a variety of urban issues including planning and program design, Geoff works across sectors to design solutions for low carbon, inclusive communities. Geoff also serves on the Board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

Hoi Kong

Hoi Kong is the Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, P.C., UBC Professor in Constitutional Law and a Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.  He researches and publishes in a range of areas of public and constitutional law and theory. Much of his work has focused on how to make the substance and processes of public and constitutional law more legitimate in the eyes of citizens. He has been an academic visitor at, among other institutions, Cornell University, Kyoto University, the Australian National University and the University of Fribourg.  At the outset of his career, he was law clerk to Justice Deschamps and Justice L’Heureux-Dubé at the Supreme Court of Canada.

Kristin Good

Kristin R. Good is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University.  She is best known for her research on local immigration and diversity policies, particularly her Municipalities and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Immigration in Toronto and Vancouver (2009), which won the Canadian Political Science Association’s Donald Smiley Prize in 2010.  Her current research, on municipal immigration policies, explores variation in Canadian cities with different demographic configurations of Francophones (in minority settings) and Indigenous peoples.  A second and related research program critically interrogates municipalities’ constitutional status in Canada, reflected in a recent paper entitled “The Fallacy of the Creatures of the Provinces; Doctrine: Recognizing and Protecting Municipalities Constitutional Status; published as an Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance (IMFG) Paper in 2019.  She is a founding co-editor (with Dr. Martin Horak) of the McGill-Queen’s Studies in Urban Governance book series.

Mary Eberts

Mary Eberts O.C. is a Senior Fellow in Residence at Massey College.   She received her legal education at Western and the Harvard Law School and has a national practice focused on constitutional law, Aboriginal law and human rights.  She is one of the counsels for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in the Bill 5 (Toronto election) case now at the Supreme Court of Canada.  Mary is one of the founders of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and was litigation counsel for the Native Women’s Association of Canada for over twenty years.  She has held the Gordon Henderson Chair in Human Rights at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law and the Ariel F. Sallows Chair in Human Rights at the College of Law, University of Saskatchewan.

Ran Hirschl

Ran Hirschl (PhD, Yale University) is Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Toronto, holder of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship in Comparative Constitutionalism at the University of Göttingen and heads the Max Planck Fellow Group in Comparative Constitutionalism. He is the author of several major books including City, State: Constitutionalism and the Megacity (Oxford University Press, 2020); Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2014) — winner of the 2015 APSA Herman Pritchett Award for the best book on law and courts; Constitutional Theocracy (Harvard University Press, 2010) — winner of the 2011 Mahoney Prize in Legal Theory; and Towards Juristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2004), as well as over 100 articles and book chapters on constitutional law and its intersection with comparative politics and society. Professor Hirschl has won academic excellence awards in five different countries. In 2014, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC).

Ratna Omidvar

The Honourable Ratna Omidvar, C.M., O.Ont. Senator for Ontario, The Senate of Canada is an internationally recognized voice on migration, diversity and inclusion.  In April 2016, Ms. Omidvar was appointed to the Senate of Canada as an independent Senator representing Ontario. As a member of the Senate’s Independent Senators Group she holds a leadership position as Liaison. Senator Omidvar also served as Deputy Chair of the Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector.  Previously at Ryerson University, Senator Omidvar was a Distinguished Visiting Professor and founded the Global Diversity Exchange.  Senator Omidvar was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 2005 and became a Member of the Order of Canada in 2011.

Signa Daum Shanks

Signa Daum Shanks is an Associate Professor and Director of Indigenous Outreach at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.  A Métis who was born and raised in Saskatoon, Dr. Daum Shanks specializes in Indigenous Laws, Indigenous Rights and Law and Economics.  Amongst other credits, she is the 2020 winner of the President's Award for the Women's Law Association of Ontario, the elected Toronto representative on the Ontario Bar Association's Board of Directors and an award-winning researcher and writer.  She is trained as both a lawyer and a historian.

Zachary Taylor

Dr. Zack Taylor is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance at the University of Western Ontario. He is a Fellow at the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and non-practicing Registered Professional Planner. His new book Shaping the Metropolis (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) compares the historical development of Canadian and American urban governance. His comparative survey of provincial local government legislation coauthored with Alec Dobson, “Power and Purpose: Canadian Municipal Law in Transition,” was published by IMFG in 2020.