Doug's Biography

The Globe and Mail, Monday, January 18, 1993
APPRECIATION
Queen's economist Douglas Purvis a 'public servant in the private sector'

A memorial celebration on Thursday in Kingston, Ont. for economist Douglas D. Purvis, who died last week at 45, drew government officials and economists from across Canada to join Queen's University faculty and staff, friends and family in paying their last respects and extending their sympathies to his wife, Trisha and sons Jaime and Joshua.

In this article, two of Dr. Purvis' close colleagues and friends - Thomas Courchene, Jarislowsky-Deutsch Professor of Economic and Financial Policy at Queen's, and Richard Harris, B.C. Telephone Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, assess his legacy.

BY THOMAS COURCHENE and RICHARD HARRIS

For those who knew Doug Purvis, our first contact was professional, but the sense of grief is intensely personal. Incredibly, Doug literally had a thousand close friends. He was a large man with a large heart. It was a privilege to be in his company.

He was gregarious, yet personable; generous and encouraging with his time and talent, yet decisive when the need arose; passionate about Canada and economics, yet professional when proffering advice. Most of all, his perpetual optimism led him and those around him to be enthusiastic about work and play. Canada and Canadian economics has lost someone who was truly a public servant in the private sector.

Doug Purvis was born in Calgary, received his BA from the University of Victoria and his MA from the University of Western Ontario. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under the tutelage of two distinguished Canadian economists, Harry Johnson and Robert Mundell.
In 1971, he arrived at Queen's where he quickly established himself as one of the leading scholars in the area of open economy macroeconomics. This theme remained throughout his career. It later surfaced in his support for free trade and flexible exchange rates and, more generally, his appreciation of the full implications of increasing globalization for a small open economy like Canada's. Doug rightly achieved an international reputation in this area, one recognition was his commission by the award committee for the Nobel Prize in economics to prepare the official record of James Tobin's contributions to economic science when Tobin won the 1981 Nobel.

In the early 1980's, as he was evolving from theorist to policy practitioner, Doug developed a second theme, a concern for the implications of an emerging government debt and deficit burden. In a series of papers, some jointly with Neil Bruce, Doug examined the longer-termed consequences of structural deficits and coined the phrase "the prudent deficit."

This was not the standard case against deficits, for despite his Chicago training, Doug remained a Keynesian and an ardent advocate of the case for fiscal stabilization. What worried him then was that the debt and deficit buildup during non-recessionary years would inevitably remove fiscal stabilization as a tool in more troubled times. Even his critics would have to admit that his concerns were justified. Would that we all had paid more heed.

A more recent theme was the economics of the Canadian constitution. Doug played a substantial scholarly and advocacy role in ensuring that the issue of preserving and enhancing Canada's internal economic union had a prominent place in the constitutional debate. He was not a decentralist, but to the extent that further decentralization was inevitable in some areas, he recognized that just as there was a pressing need for international economic co-ordination, there was an internal need to manage the policy interdependencies between Canada's different levels of government.

Doug spent his entire professional career at Queen's and contributed substantially to its reputation for serious economic scholarship and training. The Queen's economic department plays a unique role in Canada. Not only has it served for years as a conduit between academia and the federal government, but it is arguably the most influential graduate department in the country. During the 1970s, Doug was pivotal in building the doctoral and masters programs. He personally supervised many students and some of the finest macroeconomists in the country today, in academia, government and the private sector, were his doctoral students. Within Queen's, Doug was an institution. His counsel was actively sought on major decisions affecting the university and he assumed a significant number of administrative tasks over the years, most recently as head of the economics department.

But if you could ask Doug, he would say that what was most important to him was teaching and his students. He loved to talk about ideas in economics and about the great debates that have engaged the profession over the years; the role of markets versus central planning, Keynesians versus Monetarists, rules versus discretion, and international policy co-ordination versus policy independence. Generations of Queen's students were exposed to the Purvis view of economic science, the economy and the world, along with substantial doses of Purvis witticisms. His students were as loyal to him as he was to them.

Purvis played a pivotal role in the evolution of the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy, serving as its director for most of the past decade. Among the goals he set for the institute were to ensure that its approach to public policy met the highest possible standards of empirical and theoretical analysis.

His concept of the institute was not to control the agenda, but to serve as co-ordinator and facilitator for the broader Canadian economic policy community. Editors of volumes were frequently from other universities and some of the institute's conferences were held outside Kingston. In effect, the John Deutsch Institute became a policy think-tank based on the Doug Purvis network. In a matter of weeks, he could organize a conference on almost any issue and the profession's personal commitment to Doug ensured that the best minds in the country would be there.

At the time of his death, Doug was putting the finishing touches to the inaugural volume of a new initiative, the Bell Canada papers on economic and public policy. He was particularly excited about this new venture because of its significant potential to integrate even further the theory and policy sides of the economics profession, and to establish stronger links between the economics discipline and the wider Canadian policy community.

Purvis was quintessentially Queen's in the sense that he followed in the tradition of the close Queen’s/Ottawa relationship established by predecessors like Clifford Clark, W. A. Mackintosh and John Deutsch. In the early l980s, Doug was a member of the finance department's economic advisory panel, and later— from 1985 to 1987; held the position of Clifford Clark visiting economist in the finance department. More recently, he was actively involved in the constitutional process both within the system as a consultant to the Federal-Provincial Relations Office and to the Joint Parliamentary Committee and outside it as an organizer of and contributor to several academic conferences on the constitution.

The ease - even grace - with which Doug was able to move between government and the academy was remarkable, especially because the conferences he organized were typically critical of some aspects of government policy. It was a measure of our confidence in his integrity and brokering skills that he could simultaneously command the respect and confidence of both camps.

Given that Doug was at the centre of so many networks, it was hardly surprising that he was eventually drawn into the role of expositor and intellectual intermediary. Within the profession, his communications skills became evident when he became the Canadian co-author of the famous Lipsey-Steiner Economics textbook and went on to become one of the senior authors of the U.S. version.
In terms of communicating with the broader public, he and Richard Lipsey wrote a column for the Financial Post from 1980 to 1985, for which they received a National Business Writing Award in 1982. Covering a wide range of topics, these contributions were always constructive, never extreme, and though always timely, their proposals and recommendations were typically medium term in nature, in that they avoided quick fixes to complex issues. This concern for the medium term characterized much of Doug's approach; his 1985 Innis memorial lecture to the Canadian Economics Association was subtitled "The medium term is the message".

All of us will miss the wit and wisdom of Doug Purvis. With apparent ease, he could capture the essence of issues with an apt turn of phrase. Talking about the debt overhang of a potential Quebec/Rest-of-Canada rupture, Doug's reference to the “the bonds that tie” became an often quoted remark. In a recent session dealing with the Michael Porter approach to Canadian competitiveness, Purvis’ off-the-cuff comment that “diamonds are a guru's best friend” is now making the rounds in policy circles. But beyond this innate aptitude for relevant quotable quips, being part of a discussion with Doug was to be engaged in a process that was upbeat, insightful and always enjoyable. Purvis made sure of that.

In the constellation of areas where Douglas Purvis chose to concentrate his enormous energies and immense skills, he had no peer. Canada has lost a fine economist, a great teacher, a penetrating policy analyst, a superb communicator and a distinguished citizen. We cannot replace this gentle giant. But in these challenging economic times, we can celebrate his life by committing ourselves in public and professional debate to the standards that Doug so assiduously applied to his own endeavours.