In Memoriam – Stephen Clarkson (1937-2016)

February 29, 2016

We mourn the passing of a respected colleague and friend, indefatigable scholar, and beloved mentor and teacher to generations of faculty members and students.

Stephen joined the Department of Political Economy in 1964, as he was completing his doctorate from the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Sorbonne, Université de Paris. Before that he earned an MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 1959, a few years after graduating at the top of his class at Upper Canada College, he completed his undergraduate studies in modern history and modern languages at the University of Toronto and Trinity College.

After the Department was reorganized in 1982, Stephen remained a leading light in the field of Canadian political economy. His scholarly influence was wide-ranging, and he remained a passionate promoter of Canada all his life. His nationalist sympathies and deeply analytical critiques of global, regional, and national policy developments led to many contributions to academic and political life. His publications included Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct US Power (2011 with M. Mildenberger); A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance (2010 with Stepan Wood); Does North America Exist? Governing the Continent after NAFTA and 9/11 (2008); The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics (2005); Trudeau and Our Times. Vol. 1, The Magnificent Obsession and Vol. 2, The Heroic Delusion (1990 and 1994 with Christina McCall); The Canadian-American Relationship: Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State (2002); and Canada and the Reagan Challenge (2nd. ed., 1985).

In recent years, his research focused on the diffusion of foreign-investment-protection norms and investor-state dispute settlement institutions between Europe, North America and Latin America; the impact of globalization on the Canadian state with particular interest in NAFTA and the WTO and comparative economic regionalism. His contributions were widely recognized, and he received many awards and honours over the course of his distinguished career. In 2010, he was appointed to the Order of Canada. In 2004, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was a recipient of a Killam Senior Research Fellowship, a Canada-US Fulbright Scholarship, the John Dafoe Prize for Distinguished Writing, a Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, the John Porter Award from the Canadian Anthropology and Sociology Association, and many research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. During the past fifteen years, he held distinguished visiting positions at the Free University in Berlin, the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, the Law Commission of Canada, the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, DC, and the European University Institute in Florence. He was a prominent Senior Fellow of Massey College.

Stephen was devoted to his students, and he saw his teaching as the most important part of his academic life. He closely advised generations of undergraduate and graduate students. He held his students to high standards, and they responded with much energy and enthusiasm. His life-long challenge to them was to resist conventional wisdom, imagine a Canada that could live up to their highest aspirations, and go out into the world to experience first-hand the decision-making structures and policies that needed to be changed. Of his many honours, he was especially happy to receive the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Faculty of Arts and Science in 2004. Under his guidance, many of his students went on to win Rhodes Scholarships and other distinguished awards of their own. He continued teaching until the end. Just a couple of weeks ago, he led a group of students on a research trip to Portugal. Alas, it was during that trip that he contracted an infection that soon led to complications from which he was unable to recover. He died in Freiburg, Germany, the home of his wife Nora Born, on February 28, 2016.

Anyone who knew Stephen knows that what mattered most to him was his family. He leaves behind Nora as well as Kyra and Blaise, his daughters from his marriage to former Canadian Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, and Ashley McCall, his daughter from his marriage to his eminent co-author, the late Christina McCall, sons-in-law, grandchildren, many relatives, and many, many friends. He deeply loved them all, and he will be sorely missed.