Democracy on trial / Lists

The Massey Lectures are an annual week-long series of lectures on a political, cultural or philosophical topic given in Canada by a noted person. They were created in 1961 to honour Vincent Massey, Governor General of Canada. The purpose is to enable distinguished authorities to communicate the results of original study on important subjects of contemporary interest.

The event is co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The lectures have been broadcast by the CBC show Ideas since 1965. Until 2002, the lectures were recorded for broadcast in a CBC Radio studio in Toronto, with a single public lecture given at the University of Toronto. In that year, however, the lectures were taken out of the studio and turned into a truly national event, with each of the five lectures being delivered and recorded for broadcast before an audience in a different Canadian city.

There were no lectures produced in 1976 and 1980. Some lectures were never published including George Wald’s Therefore Choose Life (1970), J. Tuzo Wilson’s Limits to Science (1975) ("Past as Prologue", Literary Review of Canada) There was no lecture in 1996 because the Ideas producers and the selected lecturer, Robert Theobald, could not agree on what constituted a sufficient manuscript for the lecture. The topic was to be on the broad theme of the future of work and it was later published as Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium.