Award-winning journalist Tony Keller has been named the 2025 McGill Max Bell Lecturer. A columnist with The Globe and Mail and with a career of more than 30 years, he has been editorials editor and member of the editorial board for The Globe, editor of The Financial Post Magazine, managing editor of Maclean’s, and a news anchor at BNN (now BNN-Bloomberg). Born and raised in Montreal, he is a graduate of Duke University and Yale Law School. He won Canada’s National Newspaper Award for editorial writing in 2016.
The McGill Max Bell Lectures are held in three Canadian cities annually, and the associated book will be published each year ahead of the lecture series by Sutherland House. The McGill Max Bell Lectures are free and open to the public, made possible by a foundational gift from respected business leader and McGill alumnus Thomas E. Kierans, O.C., LLD, FICD. The inaugural lecturer was Andrew Leach in 2023 with his book “Between Doom and Denial: Facing Facts About Climate Change” about shifting energy systems and their impact on the economy. In 2024, Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar’s “The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians” highlighted corporate competition – or lack thereof. Keller’s book will focus on immigration as a core tenant of economic growth.
“In choosing the topic and lecturer for the 2025 edition of the McGill-Max Bell Lectures, the steering committee noted that immigration has become a headline and contentious issue over the past few years,” said founding director of the Max Bell School, Chris Ragan. “Given Tony’s economic lens and his clarity of thought and expression, the steering committee was delighted to recruit Tony to be the 2025 McGill Max Bell Lecturer.”
Keller has been writing extensively on these aspects of Canadian immigration for years. In the book the lectures will be based on, “Five Walls and a Door: How Canada got immigration right, and then wrong,” Keller looks at Canada’s uniquely popular and successful immigration system, how it thrived for decades, and how it was broken in the space of a few short years. Immigration can bring important economic and social benefits to a country, and the “Canadian way” of doing immigration was a model for the developed world. Keller examines the Canadian model's secret sauce, explains why the system came apart, and suggests how it can be rethought, restored and improved.
Sign up for our email list to be the first to know when our fall 2025 lecture dates are and in which cities.