Politics Patrick Boyer worked on Parliament Hill in the 1960s for Quebec MP
Heward Grafftey and for Opposition Leader Robert Stanfield. In the early 1970s, he was executive assistant to Ontario Attorney General Arthur Wishart. In 1983, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau named him executive director of the federal Task Force on Conflict of Interest, which produced the 1984 report
Ethical Conduct in the Public Sector. That year, he was elected to Parliament, representing Toronto's
Etobicoke—Lakeshore riding as a Progressive Conservative. He chaired parliamentary committees on election law reform, equality rights, and the status of disabled persons. In 1989, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney appointed him parliamentary secretary to External Affairs Minister Joe Clark. In 1991, he became parliamentary secretary to Minister of National Defence Marcel Masse. In 1993, Boyer ran unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives, following Mulroney's announced retirement. He published his policies in the book
Hands-On Democracy, in French
La democratie pour tous. In the 1993 general election, when just two Progressive Conservatives in all Canada were elected, Boyer was not one of them. In 2001, he unsuccessfully sought the
Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario provincial nomination in the riding of
Parry Sound—Muskoka for a
by-election to replace retiring
MPP Ernie Eves. In March 2007, Boyer was again nominated as the Conservative Party of Canada candidate for the riding of Etobicoke—Lakeshore. He ran in the
2008 federal election but lost to
Michael Ignatieff by 5,783 votes. During the
2007 Ontario electoral reform referendum, Patrick Boyer was a leading member, along with Senators Hugh Segal and Nancy Ruth, Hon. Janet Ecker, and Rick Anderson, of Conservatives for the proposed reform of Ontario's electoral system from "first-past-the-post" to "mixed-member proportional."
Academics Following Boyer's departure from politics, he taught "The Law of Canadian Democracy" at the
University of Toronto. In 1999 and 2000, he taught courses in Canadian Constitutional Law at
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario. As a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at
University of Guelph, Ontario, he also taught courses on politics, accountability, democracy, and ethics. He also was executive director of the university's Centre for Leadership Studies.
Public policy Boyer is a past president of the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs, past chair of Pugwash Thinkers' Lodge in Nova Scotia, and a member of Canadian Pugwash Group, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, The Writers' Union of Canada, and the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians. An advocate of
proportional representation, Boyer is a member of the National Advisory Board of
Fair Vote Canada. Also an advocate for women's wellbeing, he founded the Corinne Boyer Fund for Ovarian Cancer Research and Treatment, which continues today as Ovarian Cancer Canada. With strong interest in democracy, he is founding president of Breakout Educational Network, a not-for-profit public policy organization addressing Canadian fiscal and foreign policy from the perspective of citizens though television documentaries, books, public forums, and classroom teaching. Boyer has worked overseas on democratic development projects in Cambodia, Iraq, Vietnam, Thailand, Ukraine, and Bulgaria.
Writer and publisher J. Patrick Boyer is author of more than twenty books, dozens of feature articles, and hundreds of newspaper columns. Boyer also owns and operates publishing houses "Muskoka Books" and "Blue Butterfly Books." In 2010 he consolidated Blue Butterfly's publishing operations with those of Dundurn Press. ==Personal life==