Born in New York, Mr. Simpson came to Canada when he was 10 years old and studied at the University of Toronto Schools, Queen's University and the London School of Economics. In 1972-73, he received a parliamentary internship scholarship in Ottawa. A year later, he joined The Globe and Mail newspaper.
His career with the newspaper 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, Mr. Simpson served as The Globe's European correspondent based in London, England. He began writing his national affairs column in January, 1984.
Mr. 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.
He has written numerous magazine articles for such publications as Saturday Night, The Report on Business Magazine, The Journal of Canadian Studies, The Queen's Quarterly. He has spoken at dozens of major conferences here and abroad 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, Mr. 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.
Mr. 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, Ontario Library Board.
Note: Information provided by the Globe and Mail, Toronto, Ontario.