Last week Dennis McConaghy was announced the winner of the 2019/20 Donner Prize, given annually for the best book on Canadian Public Policy, for his book Breakdown: The Pipeline Debate and the Threat to Canada's Future. The prize is $50,000.
McConachy is a former senior executive with TransCanada Pipelines. The Donner jury describes his book as an outline of "several pragmatic strategies that can be used to reduce or remove the bottleneck to move large infrastructure projects forward (or create earlier certainty that they should not) so that investment (domestic and foreign) will be attracted to Canada" -- which makes it sound like a marketing program more than a public policy study. (But I have not read the book.)
The award citation says Breakdown is a "necessary contribution to the discussion of the perspectives of Albertans and of resource developers generally. The book is well researched, balanced and outlines several pragmatic strategies." (Italics added.)
Shortlisted titles were Empty Planet by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, Living With China by Wendy Dobson, The Wealth of First Nations by Thomas Flanagan, and The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto for the Digital Age by Richard Stursberg with Stephen Armstrong.
