Bio

Here is the staid, safe and predictable third person version:

In March 2010 Brian Lee Crowley founded the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), a public policy think tank focused on Canadian national issues (e.g. defence, national security, foreign affairs, Canada-US relations, Indigenous affairs, national economic policy, immigration, the rule of law, the judiciary, etc.) in the national capital, Ottawa. MLI’s job is to help make Canada the best governed country in the world. Obviously we have our work cut out for us.

By 2013 MLI was ranked by the University of Pennsylvania as one of the top three new think tanks in the world and it is consistently ranked the top think tank in Ottawa. It has also won a Templeton Freedom Award for Outstanding Performance by a Young Think Tank and has twice been shortlisted for a Templeton Prize for the top think tank project in the world. MLI also won a Prospect Magazine Award for our Justice System Report Card and an honourable mention for our work on creating prosperity for Aboriginal communities through, among other things, engagement with the natural resource economy. MLI and many of its senior fellows have also been blacklisted by both the Kremlin and Beijing for their work on foreign policy, defence and foreign interference and intimidation of Canadians by these two regimes in particular.

In 2024 MLI opened its Washington DC office, the Center for North American Prosperity and Security (www.cnaps.org). No other think tank in the American capital has as its sole preoccupation the health of the Canada-US relationship. CNAPS enjoys a strong working relationship with numerous Washington think tanks, including The Hudson Institute, the Center for New American Security, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and CSIS.

Crowley hosts MLI’s Vancouver speakers series, Voices that Inspire, bringing to Canada top international speakers on issues of concern to Canadians and the world. Just some of the guests he has engaged with during these fireside chats include Douglas Murray, Sir Niall Ferguson, Rob Henderson, Liz Truss and Tony Abbott. On-line viewership of these events now regularly exceeds one million people per episode.

2025 was MLI’s 15th anniversary year. Over that period MLI has shown great financial strength, rising from a budget of $800,000 in 2011 to nearly $5,000,000 in 2025. Finally MLI has become the centre of a dynamic and diverse international group of scholars and thinkers and has established a broad range of relationships with other national think tanks in the US, UK, Germany, the Czech Republic, India, Taiwan, Japan and many other countries. MLI published over 450 op-eds in national and international media as well as 75 major papers and commentaries. Its videos were viewed nearly 3,000,000 in 2025.

Crowley has published six books, including in 2009, Fearful Symmetry: the fall and rise of Canada’s founding values, and in 2020 Gardeners vs Designers: Understanding the great fault line in Canadian politics, both of which quickly found their way onto the Canadian best seller lists.  He also co-authored MLI’s first book, The Canadian Century; Moving Out of America’s Shadow, which was awarded the prestigious international Sir Antony Fisher Prize for excellence in think tank publications. He is a three-time winner of this prize and institutes under his leadership have won it a total of six times, an unbeaten record in the think tank world. He has published op-eds, columns and research papers too numerous to list here and been interviewed by major media throughout the world, including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Die Zeit, Fox News and Real Clear Politics.

It has been announced that in October, 2026, in honour of his work on MLI’s Promised Land project (on anti-Semitism, Israel, the conflict in the Middle East and the challenge of radical Islam), the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation (CAEF) will bestow on Crowley their coveted Advocate Award of Excellence for 2026.

In 2019-20, in recognition of his work on Canada’s natural resource economy Crowley was named a Distinguished Lecturer at the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM).

From 2006-08 Crowley was the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist with the Canadian federal Department of Finance, during which time he worked on a broad range of policy files and redesigned the pre-budget consultation process.  This is the most senior independent advisory role on economic policy within the federal government and it carries the rank of Assistant Deputy Minister in the department.

In 1994 he founded the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS); over the nearly 20 years he headed AIMS it became Canada’s leading regional think tank (equivalent to a US state-based think tank) and served as the model for several other regional think tanks (MEI and FCPP).

He took a two year leave of absence from AIMS (1998-99) to serve as a member of the Editorial Board of The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest circulation national newspaper. The Editor-in-Chief at the time called Crowley “the finest writer on public policy in Canada today.”

He has also headed the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC), taught politics, economics and philosophy at numerous universities in Canada, the US, the UK and Europe and has been a constitutional advisor to the governments of Nova Scotia (Charlottetown negotiations) and Manitoba (Meech Lake negotiations).  As a result of his health care policy work he was named to Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s Premier’s Advisory Council on Health. The PACH’s chairman, former Deputy Prime Minister Hon Don Mazankowski, called Crowley the “intellectual architect” of the Council’s influential final report.

He has served as a diplomat for the EEC (now the EU) Commission, an aid administrator for the UN in Zaire, Africa and an advisor to the Quebec government on parliamentary and electoral reform. He was a Salvatori Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC and has spoken at conferences, workshops and other events on public policy and the freedom movement in every part of the globe.

Crowley is a frequent commentator on political and economic issues across all media and has been a columnist for numerous newspapers across Canada.  He holds degrees from McGill and the London School of Economics, including a doctorate in political economy from the latter. His doctoral thesis focused on F.A. Hayek’s social, economic and political philosophy and was published by the Oxford University Press.

Here is how I put it before the editors get to it and squeeze all the life out of it:

Born and raised in Vancouver, from a professional point of view I am a little hard to classify. Polite folks say that I am a public intellectual; the more literal-minded think of me as a public policy troublemaker. I am certainly a serial intellectual entrepreneur – I am the Managing Director of  the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canada’s national public policy think tank in Ottawa. In January 2013 MLI (or ‘Emily’ to the cognoscenti) was named one of the top 3 new think tanks in the world by the Go-To Think Tank Project of the University of Pennsylvania. The Atlas Economic Research Foundation awarded our first book, The Canadian Century, the top international prize for excellence in think tank publications, the Sir Antony Fisher Award, in 2011. In October 2012 we won one of only two international Templeton Foundation Awards for outstanding achievement by a young institute awarded that year. In November, 2012, the building where MLI then lived was rated one of the 100 most powerful buildings in Ottawa, because of who worked there, including MLI! The Hill Times has several times named me one of the 100 most influential people in Ottawa.

You may not have heard of MLI, but Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping certainly have: both the Institute and numerous of its serior fellows have been blacklisted by both the Kremlin and Beijing. We regard this as a red badge of courage.

Before I went to MLI I was the founding president of the country’s top regional think tank, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS).

I also spent a couple of years (2006-08) in Ottawa as the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at Finance Canada, meaning I was the Department of Finance’s one-man in-house think tank, policy gadfly and general pain-in-the-derrière. 

My penchant for policy commentary was further indulged during the two years (1997-99) I served on the Editorial Board at The Globe and Mail, where William Thorsell, the then Editor in Chief, in a fit of absent-mindedness called me “the finest writer on public policy in Canada today.”

I write a distressing amount of stuff – as one friend says, I am a “gassy bugger”. My output includes six books (Gardeners vs Designers: Understanding the Great Fault Line in Canadian Politics, Sutherland House, 2020; Northern Light: Lessons for America from Canada’s Fiscal Crisis (co-authored with Robert Murphy and Niels Veldhuis), MLI, which we launched at an event at AEI in Washington, DC in 2012; The Canadian Century: Moving Out of America’s Shadow, (co-authored with Jason Clemens and Niels Veldhuis) Key Porter Books, 2010;  Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values, Key Porter Books, 2009; The Self, the Individual and the Community, Oxford University Press, 1987; The Road to Equity: Impolitic Essays, Stoddart, 1994;) and a seventh which I edited: Taking Ownership: Property Rights and Fishery Management on the Atlantic Coast, AIMS, 1996.

I have written a lot about various topics that you have to be a serious geek to be interested in: national security and defence, China policy, equalization, regional development, tax and fiscal policy, etc., but I also write lots about things a lot of people care about. Health care is one. I have twice won the Sir Antony Fisher Prize for excellence in think tank publications for my health care work, which helps explain how I ended up on the Alberta Premier’s Advisory Council on Health, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Galen Institute, a health policy think tank in Washington DC.

At different times I have been a columnist for various national and regional newspapers, and I am a talking head on CBC, Radio-Canada, CTV, Sun TV, TVO and many regional and local media with a frequency my tiny but vociferous band of detractors find distressing and explicable thanks only to a widespread conspiracy. I was a member of the National Political Panel on CBC Radio’s Morningside with the late Peter Gzowski.

I am a recovering academic, having been a tenured prof at Dalhousie, as well as having taught at many universities in Canada, the US, the UK and France. I elatedly gave up tenure to get into think tankery and continue to think it was one of the best moves I ever made (the absolute best was marrying my wife, Shelley). I have a jumble of letters after my name, most of which add up to degrees from McGill and the London School of Economics (including a doctorate in political economy from the latter) and a director’s certification from the Canadian Institute for Corporate Directors.

In addition, I have been constitutional advisor to the governments of Nova Scotia (Charlottetown negotiations) and Manitoba (Meech Lake negotiations) and had spells as a Salvatori Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, a diplomat for the EC (now the EU) Commission, an aid administrator for the UN in Africa, an advisor to the Quebec government on parliamentary and electoral reform and a parliamentary intern at the House of Commons in Ottawa.

Contrary to a popular misconception I am no slave to ideology, but am totally enslaved by cats, notably Ragnar Scissorpaws, Rollo Fluffernutter, Prince Pippin of Siberia and the two ginger ninjas, Bubble and Squeak.

I live with my wife Shelley on the banks of the Rideau just outside Ottawa.