Managing Director
In March 2010, Brian Lee Crowley founded the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), a public policy think tank focused on Canadian national issues (e.g. defence, national security, foreign affairs, Canada–US relations, Indigenous affairs, national economic policy, immigration, the rule of law, the judiciary, etc.). Based in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, MLI’s job is to help make Canada the best-governed country in the world. Obviously we have our work cut out for us.
By 2013, MLI was ranked by the University of Pennsylvania as one of the top three new think tanks in the world and it is consistently ranked the top think tank in Ottawa. It has also won a Templeton Freedom Award for Outstanding Performance by a Young Think Tank and has twice been shortlisted for a Templeton Prize for the top think tank project in the world. MLI also won a Prospect Magazine Award for our Justice System Report Card and an honourable mention for our work on creating prosperity for Aboriginal communities through, among other things, engagement with the natural resource economy.
MLI and several of its senior fellows have been blacklisted by both the Kremlin and Beijing for their work on foreign policy, defence, and foreign interference and intimidation of Canadians by those two regimes in particular.
In 2024, MLI opened its Washington, DC, office, the Center for North American Prosperity and Security (www.cnaps.org). No other think tank in the American capital has as its sole preoccupation the health of the Canada–US relationship. CNAPS enjoys a strong working relationship with numerous Washington think tanks, including The Hudson Institute, the Center for New American Security, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and CSIS.
Crowley hosts MLI’s Vancouver speaker series, Voices that Inspire, bringing top international voices to Canada to discuss issues of concern to Canadians and the world. Guests at these fireside chats include Douglas Murray, Sir Niall Ferguson, Rob Henderson, Liz Truss, and Tony Abbott. On-line viewership of Voices that Inspire now regularly exceeds one million people per episode.
In 2025, MLI celebrated its 15th anniversary. Over that period, MLI has shown great financial strength, rising from a budget of $800,000 in 2011 to nearly $5,000,000 in 2025. In 2025, MLI published more than 450 op-eds in national and international media as well as 75 major papers and commentaries. Its videos were viewed nearly 3,000,000 times in 2025.
Crowley has published six books, including Fearful Symmetry: the fall and rise of Canada’s founding values (2009), and Gardeners vs Designers: Understanding the great fault line in Canadian politics (2020), both of which quickly found their way onto the Canadian bestseller lists. He also co-authored MLI’s first book, The Canadian Century; Moving Out of America’s Shadow, which was awarded the prestigious international Sir Antony Fisher Prize for excellence in think tank publications. He is a three-time winner of this prize and institutes under his leadership have won it a total of six times – an unbeaten record in the think tank world. He has published op-eds, columns, and research papers too numerous to list here and been interviewed by major media throughout the world, including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Die Zeit, Fox News and Real Clear Politics.
From 2006–08 Crowley was the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist with the Canadian federal Department of Finance, during which time he worked on a broad range of policy files and redesigned the pre-budget consultation process. This is the most senior independent advisory role on economic policy within the federal government and it carries the rank of assistant deputy minister in the department.
In 1994, he founded the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS); over the 15 years he headed AIMS it became Canada’s leading regional think tank (equivalent to a US state-based think tank) and served as the model for several other regional think tanks (MEI and FCPP). He took a two-year leave of absence from AIMS (1998–99) to serve as a member of the Editorial Board of The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest circulation national newspaper. The editor-in-chief at the time called Crowley “the finest writer on public policy in Canada today.”
He has also headed the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC), taught politics, economics, and philosophy at numerous universities in Canada, the US, the UK, and Europe, and has been a constitutional advisor to the governments of Nova Scotia (Charlottetown negotiations) and Manitoba (Meech Lake negotiations). As a result of his healthcare policy work he was named to Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s Premier’s Advisory Council on Health (PACH). PACH’s chairman, former Deputy Prime Minister Hon. Don Mazankowski, called Crowley the “intellectual architect” of the Council’s influential final report.
