John Meisel

John Meisel CC (1923 –2025) was a Canadian political scientist, professor, and scholar, and chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

Meisel wrote on various aspects of politics, notably on parties, elections, ethnic relations, politics and leisure culture, and, at the beginning of his academic career, international politics.

Meisel was a pioneer in Canada of research on electoral behaviour, political parties and the relationship between politics and leisure culture, particularly the arts. Throughout his career he examined the cohesion (or its absence) of the Canadian communities. He also lectured and wrote about regulation, broadcasting, telecommunications, and the information society.

Meisel was born in Vienna, Austria in 1923. His father worked for Baťa Shoes at its headquarters in Zlín, Moravia, Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. As the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia became imminent, Baťa sent its Jewish employees out of Czechoslovakia to Bata centres abroad, and the Meisel family moved to Casablanca and then Haiti before settling in Bata's Canadian company town of Batawa, Ontario in 1942.