David Johnston - Boards, Commissions, and Media

Boards, Commissions, and Media

Johnston has moderated several televised leaders' debates, the first being between Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark, and Ed Broadbent, prior to the 1979 federal election, and he returned five years later to play the same role before the election of 1984, in a debate featuring Brian Mulroney, John Turner, and Broadbent. He also moderated the provincial leaders' debate featuring David Peterson, Bob Rae, and Larry Grossman, in the run up to the Ontario general election in 1987. Johnston has also acted as moderator of two public affairs panel discussion programmes, The Editors and The World in Review, which aired in the 1990s on both CBC Newsworld in Canada and PBS in the United States.

Investigations commissioned by both federal and provincial Crowns-in-Council have been chaired by Johnston, starting with the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy in the late 1980s, followed by the National Task Force on High Speed Broadband Access, the Committee on Information Systems for the Environment, the Advisory Committee on Online Learning, Ontario's Infertility and Adoption Review Panel between 2008 and 2009, and other scientific or public policy panels. He also sat on the Ontario government's Task Force on Management of Large Scale Information and Information Technology Projects and an Ontario Ministry of Health panel investigating "smart systems." Johnston further served on various corporate boards of directors, including those of Fairfax Financial Holdings, CGI Group, Dominion Textiles, Southam Incorporated, SPAR Aerospace, Seagram's, and Canada Trust, among others, and on March 22, 2010, was named to the Board of Governors of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. He is the only non-American citizen to chair the Harvard Board of Overseers.

On November 14, 2007, Johnston was appointed by Governor General Michaëlle Jean, on the advice of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as an independent adviser and charged with drafting for the Cabinet the terms of reference for the public inquiry, known as the Oliphant Commission, into the Airbus affair. This appointment itself, however, was criticized by the independent citizens' group Democracy Watch as a conflict of interest, given that Johnston had once reported directly to Mulroney during the latter's time as prime minister. Johnston completed his report on January 11, 2008, listing seventeen questions of interest for further investigation. He did not, however, include as a subject the awarding of the Airbus contract, on the basis that this aspect had already been investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, prompting criticism from opposition Members of Parliament and accusations that Johnston had acted as the Prime Minister's man. This intensified after it was later revealed that Mulroney had accepted $300,000 in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber, but Oliphant could not examine any possible link between that payment and Airbus due to the narrow scope of the commission's mandate. Others, though, such as Peter George, then-president of McMaster University, and subsequently the editorial board of The Globe and Mail, as well as Andrew Coyne in Maclean's, defended Johnston, detailing his integrity and independence. Johnston's role as special adviser was parodied by Roger Abbott on the January 11, 2008, airing of Air Farce Live.

For this corporate, government, charitable, and academic work, Johnston was in 1994 appointed to the Order of Canada as an Officer; he was promoted within the order to the rank of Companion in 1997. Johnston also gained a reputation as a non-partisan individual, but has expressed explicit support for Canadian federalism, having written a book opposing Quebec separatism, If Quebec Goes: The Real Cost of Separation. He has also published numerous books on law, chapters in other volumes, magazine articles, and aided in writing legislation. and sat as the co-chair of the Montreal No Committee during the 1995 Quebec referendum on independence.