Former Queen University’s political studies professor John Meisel died in his care home at age 101, surrounded by family on March 30.Suzy Lamont
By his own admission, John Meisel was born with “the sunniest of temperaments.” Quite simply, he always looked on the bright side. He earned a laudatory reputation as a political scientist, a cultural maven, an avid nationalist and a patron of the arts, but many colleagues and friends remember him as much for his personality as his achievements. He was a gregarious, engaged extrovert, easily recognized as the lean, lanky figure enthusiastically conversing with students, speaking at a lectern, attending a concert, or peering through black-rimmed glasses with a beret crammed atop his cumulus of white chin-length curly locks, as he rode his bicycle through the streets of Kingston to his beloved Queen’s University campus.
Born in Vienna on Oct. 23, 1923, to a German mother and Czech father, he arrived, at the age of 18, with his parents and older sister, Rose, in Canada in January, 1942. The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor and the Americans had finally joined the Allies in fighting the Axis powers during the Second World War. Prof. Meisel’s hazardous and circuitous route to Fort Erie, Ont., is the stuff of an old-fashioned movie, a melodrama that moulded his life and that of his adopted country.
The Meisels were not religious and identified as Czech rather than Jewish, a distinction that would not have mattered to Adolf Hitler after he initiated his Final Solution. Fortunately, John’s father, Fryda, had been born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, and knew the Bata family of shoemakers. He joined the company in 1929, as it was undergoing its global expansion, and soon became export manager. As the Nazi threat escalated in the 1930s, he was posted with his family to a succession of Bata operations, moving ahead of the danger from Austria to England to Holland, Morocco, Haiti and finally Canada, where he took up a senior position at the transplanted Bata Shoe Co. headquarters in the strategically located company town of Batawa, Ont. By then, the company was also producing war materials for Canada.
As political scientist Janice Gross Stein wrote in her foreword to Prof. Meisel’s memoir, A Life of Learning and Other Pleasures, the Meisel family left Europe a heartbeat before the continent was engulfed in a devastating conflagration, and eventually landed in an overwhelmingly white, monocultural society where “everyone ate sliced white bread packed in plastic packaging and knew the history of the United Empire Loyalists, even if they were not Loyalists themselves.” And yet, it was a country of postwar optimism and opportunity for a gregarious young man eager to learn.
John Meisel’s memoir, A Life of Learning and Other Pleasures.Supplied
Already multilingual because of the different countries and schools he had attended in his family’s peripatetic existence, John became, as he writes in his memoir, a “Canadian of convenience,” intending to return to Czechoslovakia as soon as the war ended. Instead, partly because of the way Canada welcomed him and partly because Czechoslovakia imposed communism, he became “a Canadian of conviction – and affection.”
He writes that late in the war he had tried to enlist but was rejected because of a severe case of juvenile osteomyelitis and his near-sightedness. Instead, he supplemented his earlier education at Ottershaw College in England by attending Pickering College in Newmarket, Ont. After matriculating, he did an undergraduate degree at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. That’s where he met Muriel (Murie) Kelly, a fellow student, artist and later a teacher. They married in August, 1949, the same year he began teaching as an instructor at Queen’s University. He was hired without a graduate degree, which would be unthinkable today, but it does speak to his ability to impress powerful people.
He took breaks from Queen’s in those early years to finish his master’s degree (on Czech philosopher and political leader Tomas Masaryk) and, several years later, to write his PhD thesis on a Canadian topic: the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties in the 1957 federal election.
He was not an Ivory Tower academic toiling away in solitude to produce magisterial tomes, although he is still widely known for his early academic work analyzing federal elections, his energetic support for political science as an emerging discipline at Queen’s, commitment to bilingualism during the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and his service as chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
“He had his greatest impact as a scholar way back in the 1960s, when he became a pioneer in examining voter behaviour and elections,” political historian Patrice Dutil of Toronto Metropolitan University said about Prof. Meisel’s analysis of the 1957 federal election, in which the Progressive Conservatives, led by John Diefenbaker, achieved a minority victory over Louis St. Laurent’s Liberals, followed, after calling a snap election the next year, by an overwhelming majority.
“As the writer or co-writer of three accounts of national elections myself [1867, 1911, 1917], I could say that study of the 1957 election [published in 1962] remains unsurpassed,” Prof. Dutil said, adding that he “continued through that decade by leading other studies on subsequent elections.”
Prof. Dutil, a Québécois by birth, also commended Prof. Meisel for his role during the Quiet Revolution, the period following Jean Lesage’s election as premier, when the province went through a massive social, economic, secular and educational upheaval. Fluently bilingual, Prof. Meisel stood apart “as a leader in Canadian political science and made Queen’s University’s department a force to contend with,” according to Prof. Dutil.
George Anderson, later a federal deputy minister and the president and CEO of the Forum of Federations, first encountered Prof. Meisel as a student in his 1966-67 seminar on French Canada. He recalled that Prof. Meisel had served on the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and made great friends with the Quebec academics and commissioners, so he was able to recruit a parade of interesting visitors from Quebec to Kingston. In February, 1967, Prof. Meisel took his seminar students on a weeklong trip to Quebec City, where they met Mr. Lesage, Daniel Johnson, several ministers and deputy ministers, journalists and academics.
“An amazing course,” Mr. Anderson recalled, explaining that Prof. Meisel “was keen for us to hear different voices and never imposed his own narrative. His outstanding quality was empathy with students and colleagues, which brought out the best in everyone.”
That quality was among the characteristics that former prime minister Joe Clark recognized when he appointed Prof. Meisel chair of the CRTC in 1979. Mr. Clark doesn’t remember precisely when he first met Prof. Meisel, but he thinks “it was on a visit to Queen’s, perhaps when I was a young leader of the opposition, and probably through Flora MacDonald.” She would later become Canada’s first female foreign minister, but at the time she was working under Prof. Meisel, the chair of the newly formed political studies department, after its split from economics. Ms. MacDonald had been a key administrator at Progressive Conservative Party headquarters under Mr. Diefenbaker. He had fired her after discovering she was in favour of a leadership review. Needing a job, she contacted Prof. Meisel, whom she knew because she had assisted him in his earlier research on the 1957 election.
Prof. Meisel, “had the instinct to understand how uniquely valuable she could be to the Queen’s faculty, teaching students about political science,” according to Mr. Clark. She quickly became the lynchpin of the newly formed department, according to a Queen’s University website, as under Prof. Meisel’s leadership “enrollment burgeoned, research funding expanded, regulations multiplied, and university administration grew more complex.”
Observing the situation, Mr. Clark, “came quickly to admire” Prof. Meisel, “the intelligent and intuitive and consistently genuine student of public policy, who was so naturally skilled at making complex public institutions work – a rare combination of ‘safe hands’ and creative and collaborative instincts.”
Always loving a challenge, Prof. Meisel jocularly suggested in his memoirs that heading up the CRTC was his version of war work, an omission from his résumé that he deeply regretted. He took a leave from Queen’s and served as chair of the CRTC from 1980 to 1983, overseeing the introduction of Pay TV in Canada, and grappling with the conundrum of regulating program content as satellite streaming of foreign content became more widespread. Declining to speculate on why Prof. Meisel left a year short of serving his five-year term as chair, Mr. Clark suggested that it could be “that this uniquely gifted professor simply wanted to come home to Queen’s.”
And that is where he remained until his eventual retirement well into his 80s. Along the way, he was the founding editor of both the Canadian Journal of Political Science and the International Political Science Review and served as president of the Royal Society of Canada. He was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 1989 and promoted to companion a decade later.
As a philanthropist, he donated his Meisel Woods property to the Rideau Valley Conservation Foundation in 2000. The property (consisting of a fairy-tale spiral cottage and a private lake on 135 acres of forested trails about an hour’s drive north of Kingston) was the place that he and Murie called home on weekends and term breaks. Ever the enthusiast, Prof. Meisel swam two lengths of the lake every morning in the summer, while in winter he skated on its frozen surface and donned his cross-country skis to explore the forest trails. Birdwatching was a year-round activity.
Back in the 1960s, he and Murie had become friendly with Hanna Dodwell and her husband because they shared a love of community, especially as it involved fostering musical and artistic activities. Eventually, after the deaths of their spouses, Ms. Dodwell and Prof. Meisel became a couple. They married in 2016.
Prof. Meisel published a memoir at the age of 90, planning to produce two more volumes. It was not to be. Finally, something was beyond his lifelong affliction to what he called ITSN, or “the inability to say no.”
He survived COVID-19, enjoyed the celebrations marking his 100th birthday in 2023, but he was plagued by dementia and losing the unwinnable battle against aging. He died in his care home at 101, surrounded by family on March 30. He leaves his wife, Hanna, and her family; his nephew, David Wilcox; and his niece, Simon Wilcox.
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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article said incorrectly that John Diefenbaker beat Lester Pearson's Liberals in 1957, but in fact the Liberal Leader at the time was Louis St. Laurent. It also stated, misleadingly, that Meisel Woods is located near Glenburnie, Ont. Both points have been corrected in this version.