André Juneau

Contrasts and continuity make up André Juneau's professional and personal lives. In the Government of Canada, where he began working in 1975, he divided his time over 30 years between two “central agencies” responsible for managing priorities, the Department of Finance and–three times–the Privy Council Office, and three socially driven sector departments (employment, immigration, and health), responsible for advancing their priorities. Finally, he was the first Infrastructure and Communities Deputy Minister.

Having left Ottawa in 2006, André held three entirely different positions: in London, as representative of Canada and Morocco on the resident Board of Directors at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), in Kingston as the Director of the Institute of Intergovernmental Relations at Queen’s University, and in Windsor as Interim President and CEO of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, a federal crown corporation.

The continuity stems from his specialties: federal-provincial-municipal relations, national unity, social policy, decision-making, and policy development. His career was highly focused on domestic issues with a significant international component: it included work on immigration and refugee files, membership on the World Health Organization’s Executive Board, the EBRD, and overseeing aspects of an international bridge initiative.

A final professional contrast: André is a practitioner of politics and administration, but he was very much involved in research in his first job in 1974, as a research assistant at Washington’s Brookings Institution, as head of several research teams, and as an active participant in the federal initiative for research in politics.

Since 2021, he has been a member of the University of Ottawa’s Board of Governors.

He is particularly proud of several generally team-based accomplishments: at the Office of the Privy Council, his support of the enactment of the Canada Health Act in 1984, including the production of all briefing notes for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the development of an immigrant integration policy, new tobacco control legislation that greatly contributed to lowering tobacco consumption, the founding of Infrastructure Canada, and his leadership on the EBRD Board during the 2007-08 financial crisis.

On the personal side: Since his return from Washington in 1975, André has lived in Ottawa. His family life takes place mostly in English, because he speaks English with his spouse, who is also a former senior federal official. He has always spoken English and French fluently, the latter being his first language. Additionally, he still considers himself a Montrealer, having grown up in that city, where his large family still lives. He is very Canadian, and he has friends and contacts all over the place. He and his spouse have four children and six grandchildren, who live in London, Gatineau, Montreal, and Quebec City.