Appointee Biographies

WILLIAM ROBSON

William Robson took office as President and Chief Executive Officer of the C.D. Howe Institute in July 2006, after serving as the Institute’s Senior Vice President since 2003 and Director of Research from 2000 to 2003. He has written more than 280 monographs, articles, chapters and books on such subjects as government budgets, pensions, healthcare financing, inflation and currency issues. His work has won awards from the Policy Research Secretariat, the Canadian Economics Association, and the Donner Canadian Foundation. He is a Senior Fellow at Massey College and holds an ICD.D designation from the Institute of Corporate Directors. He is a member of the ifo World Economic Survey expert group, and a regular commentator on BNN/Bloomberg. Bill taught undergraduate public finance and public policy at the University of Toronto from 2000 to 2003, and a Master’s level course in public finance at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

DAVID JOHNSON

David R. Johnson is emeritus professor of economics at Wilfrid Laurier University where he taught from 1985 to 2022. Professor Johnson worked at the Bankl of Canada from 1983 to 1985. He earned his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1983 following a Masters at the University of Western Ontario and a BA at the University of Toronto. Since the publication of Signposts of Success: Interpreting Ontario's Elementary School Test Scores in 2005, he has researched a number of different areas in the economics of education. These include the relation between the salaries of teachers and student achievement; acesss and persistence in post-secondary education and the effects of strikes and work-to-rule campaigns on student achievement. His most recent work measures important variation in the accuracy of high school grading across schools in Alberta. He enjoys cross-country skiing, sculling and hiking. He has completed Ontario's Bruce Trail twice.