Canadian Studies is pleased to introduce a new series of profiles, highlighting our friends and supporters as they share what our program means to them. For our inaugural interview, we sat down with advisory board chair David Stewart to discuss why he supports Canadian Studies and how he envisions the program's future.
Give us some background - what’s your connection to Canada, and how did you get involved with Canadian Studies?
I was born and raised an Anglo kid in the mostly French-speaking town of Thetford Mines, in an asbestos mining region in southern Quebec. I grew up during Quebec’s sovereignty movement and the first referendum in 1980. After the industry’s decline in the early 1980s, my family relocated to Calgary, and then again to Toronto. I finished high school there, then studied history and law at McGill University. So my formative years were quintessentially Canadian: bilingual and snowy.
I articled at a downtown Toronto law firm, then moved to Massachusetts and joined a tech startup that was later acquired by the search engine Lycos. A year after the merger, I took some time off to pursue a Masters in Cultural Studies, a longtime passion of mine. I then moved to Charlotte, North Carolina and started a new community immigration law clinic there. I was later named Executive Director of the International House of Charlotte, an international center, and started to collaborate with the Canadian Consulate in Atlanta from time to time. Eventually I moved to California to become an Academic Relations Officer for the Canadian Consulate in Silicon Valley, in 2007. Part of my job was to support the Canadian Studies program, so I worked closely with Tom Barnes, Nelson Graburn, and Irene Bloemraad during that time.
For the past six years, I’ve been working on my own as an independent consultant and investor, with a focus on Canada-US innovation projects – a mix of economic development and education policy work. My clients have included the Region of Waterloo, the Government of Quebec, the Canadian Association of University Research Parks, and the University of Saskatchewan. I have also stayed active with the Canadian community in the Bay Area, having served as Chair of the Digital Moose Lounge from 2014-17, and on the Advisory Board at UC Berkeley Canadian Studies since 2016.
What do you think makes Canadian Studies at UC Berkeley special?
I value the community and fellowship, as well as the opportunity to be exposed to new ideas that challenge the way I think about things or see problems. I find it stimulating to take a step back from my day-to-day work and learn about new scholarship around US- Canada politics, sociology, migration, and indigenous affairs. I learn a lot from the varied colloquia and discussions, and the level of analysis is way better than I get from browsing magazines or discussion groups online.
Beyond my own interest in Canadian affairs, I am also passionate about Canadian Studies because, somewhat counterintuitively, I believe it’s an effective way to explore and understand cultural differences. Many Americans and Canadians assume that their cultures are quite similar, but of course there are important differences too. When students of Canadian-American studies stumble across these cultural differences, they can sometimes be surprised by them which can offer moments of reflection and discovery.
What are your goals and priorities as a member of the board?
Before I started as the Chair, I spoke with each member of our advisory board to gauge where we should focus our energies. The feedback was that we should expand and diversify our advisory board and community outreach, and improve how we communicate our work and its impact. So we’re currently focusing on three priorities:
(i) Renew and engage our advisory board and community members: by recruiting new and diverse advisory board members, creating advisory board committee structures to improve our workflow, and engaging the wider Bay Area Canadian community in our work.
(ii) Professionalize our fundraising efforts: by improving our communication to lay a better foundation for community engagement and support. Recently we launched a “communications audit” – a strategic review of what’s working and opportunities to improve our communications channels, and to develop strategies on how to better integrate our communication with fundraising and PR efforts.
(iii) Support the program’s efforts to produce original research: to better align our growth plans with UC Berkeley’s mission, and to help our stakeholders understand our growth and impact goals. We’ve recently raised money to hire our first-ever postdoc to do their own independent research while helping with our programs. We are also continuing student and scholar exchanges through the Sproul and Hildebrand research fellowships, and our undergraduate thesis prize.
Our behind-the-scenes work on governance and communication has already helped our own staff, faculty, and advisors (including me) to realize how much supporting students and scholarship remains at the heart of our mission and our impact. We’ve heard feedback that our members and stakeholders really enjoy hearing how our program has impacted students and scholars, and where they go after their time at Berkeley. So we will be devoting more time and attention to this moving forward.
Tell us a fun anecdote about being a Canadian in the Bay Area.
I used to organize annual Canada Day events for the Consulate (and later for the Digital Moose Lounge). One of our traditions was to invite local expats to share their “Canadian stories”. Since Canadians often reported feeling culturally invisible in America, we created a space for them to share what role Canada had played in their émigré journeys. I learned a lot about the Canadian émigré experience, and our shared expat pride, from these speeches.
One year, San Francisco designer Heather Champ unfurled an image that she had designed to articulate her feelings of cultural dissonance in America – a Canadian flag with “vaguely foreign” below in an elegant font. The following year, our guest speaker was Google’s CFO, Patrick Pichette. As he was explaining his love for Canada, his cellphone rang with a Bob and Doug Mackenzie ringtone. Two years later at the 2015 sesquicentennial event, our speaker Cheryl Dartt from Facebook confessed to the crowd: “A few years ago I got a small Canadian flag tattoo. I wanted to carry a small symbol of Canada with me wherever I went!”
Six months later, Prime Minister Trudeau came to San Francisco and my wife and I were invited to the reception. I brought along some kitschy Canadian lapel pins that Scott, a Canadian friend of mine, had designed featuring fun expat slogans like “The Eh! Team”, and “Zed not Zee!” I hoped to present one to Trudeau as a gift. I arrived at the Nob Hill hotel, and soon Trudeau entered the room to applause. He was wearing a pastel blue suit that matched my own. My wife and I queued for a photo, and introduced ourselves to Trudeau in French. I presented him with one of the pins that Scott had designed, with a smiling maple leaf and the slogan “Eh to Zed!” Trudeau placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Thank you for being a champion for Canada. You and your friends are the true diplomats here. Ton pays te remercie.” After pouring my heart into Canada for years, it was exactly what I needed to hear.
After the event, I posted a photo of the encounter on Facebook, to tell the world how Scott had designed playful Canada swag that I got to present to the PM himself. Scott replied with a Canadian flag emoji, and commented: “File under: seriously proud moments. An honor to support such a great organization and to call you both friends. Twinning with Justin!” Now that was a cool Canadian expat moment.