Two of Canada’s most astute pollsters and political analysts are returning to their alma mater as adjunct faculty. Allan Gregg, the chair of Harris/Decima and host of TVOntario’s Allan Gregg in Conversation With, joins the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs and the Clayton Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management as an adjunct professor. David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data and the in-house pollster for Sun News, also joins the Arthur Kroeger College, where he took his undergraduate degree, as an adjunct professor.
Allan Gregg was a doctoral student and lecturer in Political Science at Carleton University in the 1970s before the demands of a young family obliged him to give up his studies. He went on to found Decima Research and became pollster and strategist for the Progressive Conservative Party under Brian Mulroney, being credited as a key architect of the party’s federal election victories in 1984 and 1988. Over his career he has participated in more than 50 election campaigns on three continents.
He sold his share of Decima following the 1993 federal election, and after a sabbatical co-founded a new company, The Strategic Counsel, in 1995. He left that partnership in 2007, when he returned to Harris/Decima as chair.
He served for five years as the chair of the Toronto International Film Festival, he was one of the founders of YTV, the Canadian children’s television channel, he co-managed The Tragically Hip, and has served as chair of The Walrus Foundation, on whose advisory board he still sits. Along with Chantal Hébert and Andrew Coyne, he was a longstanding regular member of the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National until 2011, when he left to devote more time to longer-form writing.
He has maintained his relation with Carleton University and in 2001 delivered the second annual Kesterton Lecture for its School of Journalism and Communication on Parliament Hill. As an adjunct faculty member, students in the Master of Political Management program and the Bachelor of Public Affairs and Policy Management will be able to call on his counsel, experience and expertise.
He has also kindly agreed to deliver an address and participate in a panel discussion (Carleton University in Conversation With Allan Gregg) to kick off the 20012-13 academic year and mark the full occupancy of the University’s splendid new River Building – home to the School of Journalism and Communication, the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, the School of Public Policy and Administration, the Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management, and the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies – on September 5.
David Coletto, meanwhile, is in the vanguard of a new generation of pollsters and political analysts. He graduated from Carleton’s Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs with a Bachelor of Public Affairs and Policy Management in 2004, specializing in Strategic Public Opinion and Policy Analysis (SPOPA). He went on to earn his M.A. in Political Science from Carleton and his Ph.D. from the University of Calgary. He returned to Ottawa in 2010 to head Abacus Data, a new national polling firm, and in 2011 was named one of Ottawa Life magazine’s Top 25 people.
He is particularly interested in young Canadians: he created Abacus Data’s Canadian Millennial Research Practice, developed to help clients connect and engage with the Millennial generation, Canadians born between 1980 and 2000. For the past two summers he has arranged for a summer job at Abacus for a graduate of the Arthur Kroeger College, and in the coming academic year he will teach the capstone course for the SPOPA stream of the Bachelor of Public Affairs and Policy Management, as well as political marketing for Communication Studies students.