Diane Francis

Background

Francis was born in Chicago, Illinois. She is married and has two adult children. She is a high school graduate.

Career

Francis was a reporter and columnist with Maclean's Magazine, The Toronto Star from 1981 to 1987 and then became a columnist with the Financial Post in 1987 and its editor from 1991 to 1998, when it was taken over by the National Post and incorporated into it. She has been a columnist and editor-at-large at the National Post since then; her columns are widely cited, quoted and republished. She also a regular contributor to the New York Post, the Atlantic Council, the Huffington Post, a broadcaster, speaker and author of ten books on Canadian socio-economic subjects.

Francis is Distinguished Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto. She was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center in autumn 2005 and has been a Media Fellow at the World Economic Forum. In 2013 and 2015, she served as a media advisor to graduate student teams at Singularity University in the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. In 2015, she became Adjunct Faculty with Singularity University and will participate in conferences and other projects such as mentoring teams in the institution's Global Challenges program.

She is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council specializing in the Ukraine-Russia relationship. She has contributed many articles and written a White Paper about the nexus in the region of white collar crime and power that was published by the Council and Newsweek Magazine in 2016. She was named in June 2016 to the Advisory Council of the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Initiative, an extension database about kleptocrats created for law enforcement, journalistic and research purposes.

Books

Francis' 1986 book Controlling Interest: Who Owns Canada? produced "the startling fact that one-third of Canada’s wealth was in the hands of just 32 families and five conglomerates"; it featured in Canadian best-seller lists for over a year. Her 2008 followup, Who Owns Canada Now: Old Money, New Money and The Future of Canadian Business showed that whilst much of the wealth covered in her earlier book had been inherited, 55 of the 75 wealthy families or individuals profiled were self-made. 36 of these had never been interviewed before, including K. Rai Sahi, the CEO of ClubLink Enterprises Limited, Canada’s largest owner and operator of member golf clubs.

Her 1996 book titled Fighting for Canada was published in the French language as Maîtres Chanteurs Chez Nous!. In it, she alleged subversive tactics and violations of human rights by members of the Quebec sovereignty movement during the 1995 Quebec referendum.

In 2013, she published Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country, which argued for the economic and/or political union of Canada and the United States.

Journalism

Francis has interviewed, and written about, hundreds of CEOs, billionaires, heads of state, international criminals, Interpol officials, thinkers and academics. These include Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates, George Soros, Carlos Salinas, Christine Lagarde, Pervez Musharraf, Angel Gurria, Raghuram Rajan, Larry Summers, Clayton Christensen and dozens more. She has also been able to observe and interview the world’s political and thought leaders for 20 years at the World Economic Forum. She has traveled and covered major news events: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the dismantling of the Soviet Union; the restructuring of the former Soviet satellite nations; the reunification of Germany; the enfranchisement of blacks and election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa; the independence of Ukraine then its Orange Revolution; the events and elections leading to free trade and NAFTA; the corrupt elections and the 1994 assassination of Presidential candidate Colosio in Mexico; the 1994 Chiapas rebellion in Mexico by Mayans including an interview in the jungle with its guerrilla leader, Subcommandante Marcos; the dangers and dreams of Mexicans and their smugglers crossing “el bordo” illegally from Tijuana to San Diego; the battle in Colombia against cocaine smugglers; the Quebec referendum battle in 1995 on separation from Canada; how the world’s biggest boiler room stock fraud took place out of Amsterdam and how the world’s biggest gold swindle, Bre-X, was pulled off in Calgary, the Philippines and Indonesia.

In her article in Financial Post, published a day after the 2013 The International Center for Investigative Journalists offshore tax haven US$32-trillion industry story broke, Diane Francis described her first job in Canada working for the tax lawyer of Canada's richest individual and industrialist, E. P. Taylor. At that time, Francis' employer created hundreds of new corporations dividing Taylor’s huge income so that he would pay the minimal small business income tax. She described K. C. Irving and E. P. Taylor as patrons and beneficiaries of the offshore tax haven industry. In 1959, Taylor created the world’s first exclusive gated tax haven, Lyford Cay, Bahamas where Arthur Hailey, Sean Connery, Henry Ford II, Aga Khan IV, Prince Rainier, Stavros Niarchos and Sir John Templeton also resided. In 1972 K. C. Irving established himself as a resident of Bermuda, "placed ownership of his empire into a series of tax-free Bermuda trusts" that have "never paid taxes to Canada."

View on environmental problems and overpopulation

In a column which referred to the then current 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Francis wrote: "The 'inconvenient truth' overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world." She described various environmental issues related to overpopulation, and stated that: "A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days."

Recognition and affiliations

Francis has been conferred with four honorary doctorates from universities, been the recipient of awards for her work in journalism from organizations, publications, and universities in Canada. She has served on the advisory board of the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research and a member of the board of directors for CARE Canada, and as the volunteer chair for the fund-raising campaign for Ryerson University's community health center.

Francis has been a director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 2008, the Canada Ukraine Chamber of Commerce in 1989 and Ryerson Cabinet since 2011. Francis became a director of Lake Shore Gold Corp, listed on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges, in November 2013.

Francis became a Director of Aurizon Mines Ltd., listed on the Toronto and American Stock Exchanges September 2007.