Quick Facts
Biography
John Meisel, CC (born October 23, 1923) is a Canadian political scientist, professor, and scholar.
Career
Born in Vienna, Austria, Meisel moved to Canada in 1942.
He matriculated from Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. He received his university training at Victoria College (U of T), attended the University of Toronto and the London School of Political Science and Economics, University of London. He has taught at Queen's University since 1949, where he is a professor emeritus. He served on the Ontario Advisory Committee on Confederation in 1965.
He has written extensively on various aspects of politics, notably on parties, elections, ethnic relations, politics and leisure culture, and, at the beginning of his academic career, international politics. He has been a pioneer in Canada of research on electoral behaviour, political parties and the relationship between politics and leisure culture, particularly the arts. Throughout his career he has examined the cohesion (or its absence) of the Canadian communities. He has also lectured and written about regulation, broadcasting, telecommunications, and the information society.
He worked on the 1965 Canadian National Election Study, and was a member of the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) Council from 1966 to 1968.
In 1975, he was a consultant for the Trilateral Commission's report Crisis of Democracy. From 1980 to 1983 he was Chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. From 1992 until 1995, he was the 103rd President of the Royal Society of Canada.
In 1989 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada; promoted to Companion in 1999.
He was the founding editor of The Canadian Journal of Political Science and of The International Political Science Review.
In addition to his contributions to Canadian university research and public communications, Dr Meisel is known for his philanthropy in Kingston, Ontario. One gift was his 50-hectare property near Crow Lake north of Kingston. This was donated to the Rideau Valley Conservation Foundation in 2000 as a sanctuary of peace and quiet for the residents of Eastern Ontario. The property is called the Meisel Woods Conservation Area. Over the years, modest improvements and public safety features have been installed. A commemorative trail called the Sandi Slater Memorial Walk has been added by the Foundation.