This composite image shows 2025-26 Donner Prize finalists.HO/The Canadian Press
Boom and doom mark the five titles nominated for this year’s Donner Prize, the $60,000 award that annually recognizes the best public policy book by a Canadian. Alarm-bell subjects include a Canada economically at risk, immigration indecision, a country threatened by digital technology and federal policy underperformance.
A pair of Globe and Mail columnists, John Ibbitson and Tony Keller, are among the shortlisted authors.
Keller’s Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong, published by Sutherland House Books, examines once-successful immigration strategies that are now a source of frustration. In its citation, the Donner jury praised Borderline Chaos’s clarity and insistence on evidence-based policymaking, calling the book “compelling and infuriating in equal measure.”
Ibbitson is no stranger to the award wars: His biography Stephen Harper was the winner of the 2015 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing, while 2008’s The Landing earned the Governor General’s Award for children’s literature.
He and Darrell Bricker were nominated for the Donner in 2019 for Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline. The pair is once again eying the podium for Breaking Point: The New Big Shifts Putting Canada at Risk, published by Signal. The jury noted the authors’ “compelling case that the pressures accumulating around housing, productivity, regional grievance, immigration mismanagement and generational inequality are converging in ways that threaten national cohesion.”
The 28th Donner will be presented at a gala dinner in Toronto on May 14. In addition to winner’s prize money, the other shortlisted authors receive $7,500 (to be shared if the title has multiple authors), handed out by the Donner Canadian Foundation.
This year’s jury is composed of Antonia Maioni, McGill University professor; Karen Restoule, director of Indigenous affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute; Neil Desai, corporate executive and former director of YMCA Canada; Maureen O’Neil, board chair of WaterAid International; and Brett House, Columbia Business School professor. Donner jury chair André Beaulieu is CEO of the Azrieli Foundation.
The other nominated books are 21 Things You Need to Know About Indigenous Self-Government: A Conversation About Dismantling the Indian Act, by Bob Joseph (published by Page Two); A New Blueprint for Government: Reshaping Power, The PMO, and the Public Service, by Kevin G. Lynch and James R. Mitchell (University of Regina Press); and The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, by Tim Wu (Alfred A. Knopf).
A year ago, Kevin Quigley, Kaitlynne Lowe, Sarah Moore and Brianna Wolfe shared the Donner Prize for their book Seized By Uncertainty: The Markets, Media and Special Interests that Shaped Canada’s Response to COVID-19.
Among previous Donner recipients are two-time winners Thomas Courchene and Michael Byers and The Globe’s Doug Saunders and Jeffrey Simpson.