Matthew Mendelsohn is a Canadian public policy expert and public sector executive, best known for leading Prime Minister’s Justin Trudeau’s Results & Delivery Unit and the Government of Canada’s Impact & Innovation Unit from 2016-2020. These followed his role as a chief architect of the Liberals’ 2015 election platform and serving as a member of incoming Prime Minister Trudeau’s transition team, helping with cabinet selection and penning open and public Ministerial mandate letters. He was the Founding Director of the Mowat Centre in 2009, a Canadian public policy think tank at the University of Toronto. He had previously served as a deputy minister in the Ontario Government and was a professor of Political Science at Queen’s University. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto after announcing his decision to leave the federal government in February 2020. He is also a Senior Advisor with Boston Consulting Group's Global Public Sector Practice. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Kirsten Mercer, a lawyer and a partner at Goldblatt Partners, and their two children. Early life Mendelsohn grew up in Montreal, Canada. He graduated from West Hill High School, a public school in the Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighbourhood. He received a B.A. in Political science from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from l’Université de Montréal. While attending university, Mendelsohn was president of the McGill Debating Union and the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate, and won the award for Top Speaker at the 1987 Canadian National Debating Championship and the third place speaker award at the World Championships at Fordham University in 1986. Academic career Mendelsohn joined the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University in 1992, following a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia. He taught courses and published in the areas of Canadian Politics, quantitative research methods, public opinion and data analysis, democratic institutions, federalism, political communications and elections. He received tenure in 1999. His scholarly work on media, public opinion, federalism, Canadian values, referendums, democratic institutions and Quebec nationalism was widely cited. During his time at Queen’s, he was the chief architect of the Portraits of Canada survey conducted for the Centre for Research and Information on Canada, designed the survey for the Globe and Mail’s New Canada Project and served as the Director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archive. The Mowat Centre Matthew founded the Mowat Centre in February 2009 in