Michael D Behiels

Michael Behiels FRSC is a professor and University Research Chair in the Department of history at the University of Ottawa, specializing in twentieth-century Canadian politics. A student of Ramsay Cook, he is a prominent defender of Pierre Trudeau's conception of federalism: no special status for Quebec and maintenance of linguistic minority rights. In 1985, while a faculty member at Acadia University, his published doctoral dissertation Prelude to Quebec's Quiet Revolution was nominated for the Governor General's Award for non-fiction. Thanks to this book's success, he is still considered to be a major authority on the thought of former Le Devoir editor André Laurendeau.

He frequently appears in the media to comment on current events, most notably on CPAC's weekly call-in show Goldhawk Live.

Behiels in 2010 has argued that Canada has recently undergone a political realignment, of the sort that occurs rarely and makes a long term shift in the political alignment of the parties. The patterns of the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections and the continuance of Harpers government, argues Behiels, has led many of Canada's political experts to the conclusion that a new political party paradigm has emerged. Behiels says they find its basis in a right-wing political party capable of reconfiguring the role of the state – federal and provincial – in twenty-first-century.

In 2011, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.