Edward Broadbent

Ed Broadbent (P.C., C.C., Ph.D.) was Leader of the New Democratic Party from 1975 to 1989.  Between 1979 and 1990, he was a Vice-President of the Socialist International.  From 1990 to 1996, he was the founding President of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development in Montreal (now called Rights and Democracy).  In 1996, he was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.  He held the J.S. Woodsworth Chair at Simon Fraser University and was a Visiting Professor at McGill.  He then became Skelton-Clark Fellow in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University, where he is now a Fellow in the School of Policy Studies.

Mr. Broadbent was born in Oshawa in1936.  After graduating first in his class in philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1959, he did postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics and obtained his doctorate in political science from the University of Toronto in 1966.  He taught at York University for three years before being elected to Parliament as NDP Member for Oshawa, in 1968.

Among Mr. Broadbent's academic publications is Democratic Equality: What Went Wrong? (University of Toronto Press, 2001).  He has been a guest lecturer at several Canadian universities as well as at Oxford and Edinburgh; Brown, Harvard and the University of Texas; Calcutta and New Delhi.  He has received honorary degrees from a number of Canadian universities.  Mr. Broadbent was made a member of the Privy Council in 1982, an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1993 and a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2002.