William Watson

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

William Watson is a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, for which he blogged weekly from 2015 to 2019 and has written a number of publications, the first in 1988. Born and raised in Montreal and educated at McGill and Yale, William Watson taught at McGill from 1977 to 2017. He was Chair of Economics from 2005 to 2010 and Acting Chair in 2016/17. He is best known for his twice-weekly columns in the Financial Post (where he has written since 1980 and where he also edits the FPComment page). From 1998 to 2002, he edited Policy Options politiques, the magazine of Montreal’s Institute for Research on Public Policy. While on a leave from McGill in 1997/8 he served as editorial pages editor of the Ottawa Citizen. He won the 1989 National Magazine Awards gold medal for humour for a piece in Saturday Night magazine about a trip to New York. His book, Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life, published by the University of Toronto Press, was runner-up for the Donner Prize for best book on Canadian public policy of 1998. His most recent book, The Inequality Trap: Fighting Capitalism instead of Poverty, also from UTPress, was shortlisted for the National Business Book Award 2016.