Faculty of Social Sciences

Tony Dean graduated from McMaster University in 1980, became a senior public servant and now a Canadian Senator. Senator Dean joined the Ontario public service in 1989. Over the following decade, he rose through the ranks in the Ministry of Labour where his work on labour policy, collective bargaining and communications led to his appointment as Deputy Minister. Just a year later, he became Deputy Minister and Associate Secretary of Cabinet for the Province of Ontario, and from 2002 to 2008, he was Secretary of the Cabinet and Head of the Public Service. In these roles, he established Service Ontario, promoted collaboration within and between governments and worked with provincial governments formed by three different political parties.

After retiring from the Ontario Public Service in 2009, Senator Dean became a professor in the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto and he remains a distinguished senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs today. In 2010, he was appointed senior research fellow at the Kennedy School’s Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University. He has written extensively on public sector leadership, including co-authoring a Mowat Centre report on fiscal sustainability in Canada and authoring both a report on integrated public service delivery in Commonwealth countries and the book Building Better Public Services. He chaired expert advisory panels on teachers’ benefit plans, occupational health and safety and business and human resource planning in Canada’s public service. He has also acted as an independent expert advisor on public sector pension plan governance.