The four authors of Seized By Uncertainty: The Markets, Media and Special Interests that Shaped Canada’s Response to COVID-19 will share the 2024 Donner Prize for the book, which was the result of research conducted as the COVID-19 health crisis shut down public life in Canada and abroad. Top row: Brianna Wolfe, left, and Sarah Moore Bottom row: Kaitlynne Lowe, left, and Kevin QuigleySupplied
Four authors will share the 2024 Donner Prize for their book Seized By Uncertainty: The Markets, Media and Special Interests that Shaped Canada’s Response to COVID-19. The winning book was announced at a gala dinner on Thursday in Toronto.
Kevin Quigley, Kaitlynne Lowe, Sarah Moore and Brianna Wolfe will split the $60,000 prize handed out annually by the Donner Canadian Foundation to the best book on public policy by a Canadian. Quigley is the scholarly director of the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance at Dalhousie University in Halifax. His co-authors are research assistants at the institute.
Quigley is also a professor at Dalhousie, specializing in public sector risk and crisis management, strategic management and critical infrastructure protection. His previous book, Too Critical to Fail: How Canada Manages Threats to Critical Infrastructure, was shortlisted for the 2017 Donner Prize.
Seized By Uncertainty is published by Montreal-based McGill-Queen’s University Press. It was the result of research conducted in real time, beginning in March 2020, as the COVID-19 health crisis shut down public life in Canada and abroad. Much of the research was presented in briefing notes published by the MacEachen Institute throughout the pandemic.
Saying it offered a portrayal of policymaking and implementation in crisis mode, the Donner Prize jury praised Seized By Uncertainty for a “clear message that institutional inertia may prevent us from learning the right lessons from the pandemic.”
The jury was comprised of Antonia Maioni, Jack Mintz, Maureen O’Neil, Neil Desai, Fred Wien and jury chair André Beaulieu. They reviewed more than 80 books submitted by a record 47 publishers, in English and French.
The four other shortlisted titles will each receive $7,500. Those nominated books were And Sometimes They Kill You: Confronting the Epidemic of Intimate Partner Violence, by Pamela Cross; Constraining the Court: Judicial Power and Policy Implementation in the Charter Era, by James B. Kelly; Hard Lessons in Corporate Governance, by Bryce C. Tingle; and Fiscal Choices: Canada After the Pandemic, by Michael M. Atkinson and Haizhen Mou.
The award was founded in 1998. The 2023 Donner Prize went to lawyer Michael Byers and astrophysicist Aaron Boley for Who Owns Outer Space?, about the environmental, safety and security challenges to humanity’s rapid expansion into the stars.
