Gordon Laxer is the Director of Parkland Institute, a non-corporate, research network at the University of Alberta. Parkland is a highly visible institute in Alberta’s heartland, that the Globe and Mail once called Alberta’s ‘unofficial opposition’. Gordon is Parkland’s co-founder, and has been its only Director since 1996.

He is a Political Economy professor and has published over 34 journal articles and book chapters. Gordon is author or editor of five books, including Open for Business: The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada, which received the 1992 John Porter Award from the Canadian Sociology Association for best book written about Canada. Gordon was the Principal Investigator of a 6-year, $1.9 million research project: Neoliberal Globalism and its Challengers: Reclaiming the Commons in the Semi-periphery, the comparative Study of Canada, Australia, Mexico and Norway. [Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada]. 2000-2006. 

Gordon is a socially-engaged, public intellectual who appears frequently in print and on broadcast media. He has frequently written opinion pieces for the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, The Edmonton Journal, Canadian Dimension, and other publications. He has given many radio interviews, including four on the CBC’s The Current since 2007. Gordon is currently involved in several issues: energy security, the environment, Canadian sovereignty, international development, challenging the U.S. Empire, and myths about globalization. He was first Chairperson of the Toronto chapter of the Waffle movement for an ‘independent Socialist Canada’ (1969), and first President of Edmonton’s Chapter of the Council of Canadians (1985). Gordon was on the national board of the Council of Canadians for five years from the spring of 2004. 

Gordon Laxer’s testimony as an invited expert witness on the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership) to the House of Commons International Trade committee in May 2007 shut down the hearings. They have not resumed. Leon Benoit, the Conservative Chair of the committee was so incensed by Gordon’s testimony, that he cut him off after three minutes and stormed out of the meeting after his ruling was successfully challenged by the majority of the committee’s MPs. The brouhaha made front section stories in the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, and Edmonton Journal, on May 11, 2007. The Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal ran Gordon‘s suppressed testimony in full five days later. The Globe and Mail published Gordon’s op ed on the incident a few days after that. 

Gordon is currently writing a book: Freezing in the dark: Energy Security for Canadians. He is also preparing for the day the oil stops by cycling to work through Edmonton’s winters.

Gordon’s books include:

• Not for Sale. Decommodifying Public Life, co-edited with Dennis Soron. [Broadview Press, 2006.]
• Global Civil Society and Its Limits, co-edited with Sandra Halperin [Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.]
• The Trojan Horse: Alberta and the Future of Canada, co-edited with Trevor Harrison [Black Rose Books, 1995]
• Perspectives on Canadian Economic Development: Class, Staples, Gender and Elites, editor [Oxford University Press, 1991]
• Open for Business: The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada. Oxford University Press, 1989.

Some of Gordon’s op eds, journal articles and book chapters are available on this site.