Speaker Biography
After a brilliant career as a senior federal finance official and bank chief economist, in which he has been a force in shaping and interpreting the modern Canadian economy, Don Drummond, the former senior federal civil servant and Chief Economist at the TD Bank, is now the Matthews Fellow and Visiting Scholar in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University.
Drummond has been present at the defining moments of recent Canadian economic history. As a key strategist in the Department of Finance in the 1990s, he helped tame the deficit and debt crises and set the country on the road to substantive tax reform.
He seamlessly shifted to the private sector, turning the position of Toronto-Dominion Bank’s chief economist into a critical piece of the bank’s marketing effort, basically reinventing the role of economist as media star. He had a front-row seat on the 2008 financial meltdown, which, despite pain for many people, was fascinating grist for an economist’s intellectual mill.
Indeed, as a finance mandarin, Don had helped create the conditions that allowed Canada to come through the disaster in better condition than almost any other industrial power.
During almost 23 years at the federal Depart of Finance, Mr. Drummond held a series of progressively more senior positions in the areas of economic analysis and forecasting, fiscal policy and tax policy. His last three positions were respectively, Assistant Deputy Minister of Fiscal Policy & Economic Analysis, Assistant Deputy Minister of Tax Policy & Legislation and most recently, Associate Deputy Minister.
In this latter position Mr. Drummond was responsible for economic analysis, fiscal policy, tax policy, social policy and federal-provincial relations. In particular, Mr. Drummond coordinated the planning of the annual federal budgets. Mr. Drummond travels widely, speaking to various groups about the economy and its prospects and he is frequently quoted by the media on economic and policy issues.
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