Joseph Quesnel

About Joseph Quesnel

Joseph Quesnel is a research fellow with the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS). A Northern Ontarian by background, Joseph now lives in Antigonish in eastern Nova Scotia with his wife Melanie. Joseph is also Quebec Metis by heritage and interested in Indigenous issues, in particular effective governance and economic development. He is also a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute, where he writes mainly on Aboriginal issues. Joseph also contributes mainly Aboriginal opinion pieces to Troy Media, a distributor of editorial content. He is a graduate of McGill University, where he majored in political science and history, specializing in constitutional law and process. In 2004, he also completed courses for a master of journalism degree at Carleton University, where he specialized in public affairs reporting. While at Carleton, Joseph also covered the work of House and Senate parliamentary committees. Joseph has worked for over 15 years in print journalism, including at a business newsmagazine and a national Aboriginal newspaper. For several years, Joseph sat on the editorial board for C2C Journal, an online public affairs publication. For almost 10 years, Joseph worked as a full-time policy analyst with the Prairie-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy, where he worked mainly on Aboriginal issues, but also on property rights and water market issues. Joseph led the Frontier Centre’s Aboriginal Governance Index, an annual barometer of perceptions of quality of governance and services on Prairie First Nations. For this Index, Joseph helped develop the opinion survey distributed to band members and travelled extensively to Prairie reserves. He also led a major study on the self-governing Nisga’a Nation in 2010. Joseph also produced Canada’s first Property Rights Index, that measures property rights protections in all 10 provinces and three territories. Joseph’s work has been published in newspapers all across Canada, including the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, the Chronicle-Herald, the Telegraph Journal, as well as many other newspapers. He has been featured on many radio talk shows across the country, including CBC’s The Current. He has also been interviewed on TV news programs, such as Canada AM and numerous CBC shows. For several years, Joseph has contributed an opinion column to the Winnipeg Sun and also produces a column on Aboriginal affairs for the Taxpayer, the flagship publication for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.