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Remembering Professor Emeritus Ed Safarian

Honouring a professor, colleague and friend

Ed SafarianIt is with sadness that I inform the Rotman community that Professor Emeritus Ed Safarian passed away on January 30th, 2016.  He was 94.  Until the last year he had been an active member of the Rotman community pursuing research, mentoring colleagues, and contributing to the public discourse on public policy issues.  He will be sorely missed here at Rotman  and  by his many friends and colleagues around the world.

A Professor of Business Economics at the University of Toronto since 1966, Ed served as President of the Canadian Economics Association (1977-78) and as Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto (1971-76).   He has been a major contributor to our understanding of multinational enterprises and of public policy through his pioneering books The Canadian Economy in the Great Depression (1958), Foreign Ownership of Canadian Industry (1966), Canadian Federalism and Economic Interpretation (1973), Governments and Multinationals: Policies in the Developed Countries (1983) and Multinational Enterprise and Public Policy: A Study of the Industrial Countries (1993).  In 2011 University of Toronto Press published an updated third edition of his Foreign Ownership of Canadian Industry.  That Fall Ed gave a public talk at Rotman partly based on it to over 100 people.

Ed has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1973.  In 1977 he was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal.   In 2005 he was named a Member of the Order of Canada for his contributions to the social sciences, which included research on multinational enterprises, international trade and investment, Canadian federalism, the Great Depression of the 1930's, and public policy.

Ed's family noted that January 30, 2016 was his 66th wedding anniversary and that it was a good day to be reunited with his wife Joan, who passed away in September 2014.   

Our deepest sympathies go to the Safarian family.

 

Tiff Macklem