Evan Fraser
Evan Fraser completed a PhD and post-doc at the University of British Columbia and worked at the University of Leeds in the UK between 2003 and 2010. He currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Human Security in the department of geography at the University of Guelph. His work is on challenges to food security over the next two generations, during which time population growth and climate change threaten to make food harder to produce and more expensive to buy. He has worked extensively with climate modelers, economists, ecologists, anthropologists, and journalists to explore possible solutions to this global challenge. He has written two popular books on food and sustainable agriculture including Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations and regularly talks to the media on these topics.
Margaret Webb
Margaret Webb is the author of Apples to Oysters: A Food Lover’s Tour of Canadian Farms (Penguin Canada, 2008), which won a national culinary book award (Silver, Taste Canada). In 2009, she penned a 10-part feature series for The Toronto Star called “Crisis on the Farm,” which culminated in a call for a national food policy for Canada that would create a local, healthy, environmentally sustainable food system. Publicity generated from the series pressured the provincial government to step in to protect organic poultry production. She works in a number of mediums, as a screenwriter, fiction writer, journalist and nonfiction author and her work has been published in Canada’s leading publications. She is a member of both Slow Food and the Canadian Organic Growers and a good-food advocate for local, sustainable, GE-free and organic farming.
Guillaume Bourque
Guillaume Bourque is a professional researcher with NSERC HydroNet, a pan-Canadian research network promoting sustainable hydropower and healthy aquatic ecosystems in Canada. He has a B.Sc. from the Université du Québec à Montréal and a M.Sc. from Acadia University (Wolfville, NS), both in biology. His professionnal interests are focused on habitat modelling for fish, turtles and other cold-blooded vertebrates living in freshwater habitats. Guillaume has studied a wide range of freshwater habitats, including wetlands, streams, rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and has been involved in fisheries research for 7 years. He also loves teaching and is regularly involved in numerous undergraduates and graduates classes. Guillaume came to Slow Food through his long-time friend Bobby Grégoire (current Slow Food Montréal President and former Slow Food Canada Interim President). Guillaume has been unofficially promoting Slow Food values for several years, and decided in 2012 to take a more active part in the movement.
Nancy J. Turner
Distinguished Professor and Hakai Professor in Ethnoecology, Nancy Turner, CM, OBC, PhD, FRSC, FLS is an ethnobotanist and ethnoecologist whose research integrates the fields of botany and ecology with anthropology, geography and linguistics, among others. She is interested in the Indigenous food systems, traditional knowledge systems and traditional land and resource management systems of Indigenous Peoples, particularly in western Canada. Nancy has worked with First Nations elders and cultural specialists in northwestern North America for over 40 years, collaborating with Indigenous communities to help document, retain and promote their traditional knowledge of plants and habitats, including Indigenous foods, materials and medicines, as well as language and vocabulary relating to plants and environments. Her interests also include the roles of plants and animals in narratives, ceremonies, language and belief systems.
Sinclair Philip, Canadian Councillor to the International Slow Food Board
Sinclair Philip has co-owned his seaside inn and restaurant, Sooke Harbour House, on Vancouver Island for 34 years. Sinclair received his Ph.D., Doctorat d’état, from the University of Grenoble in France and is also a recipient of the Canadian Governor General’s Nation’s Table Award. In 2001, Sinclair Philip co-founded the Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands Slow Food Convivium with Mara Jernigan and has served on their board for 14 years. In the absence of a Canadian National Board, he acted as president of Slow Food Canada from 2003-2007, is presently a member of the Canadian Board and has been the Canadian representative to the International Slow Food Board since 2003. Sinclair was involved in the Canadian Ark Commission under the direction of Mara Jernigan and the herring spawn on kelp project was launched as a Slow Food Ark product at Sooke Harbour House. He also played an active role in the establishment of the Red Fife Wheat Presidium.
Dr. John Volpe
Dr. John Volpe leads the Seafood Ecology Research Group at the University of Victoria. Trained as a population and molecular ecologist, he and his students use data intensive approaches to undercover linkages between ecological and social sustainability in marine-based food production systems, particularly aquaculture. In addition to the Global Aquaculture Performance Index (GAPI) initiative, salmon, sablefish and bivalve aquaculture, aquaculture-capture fisheries interactions, invasive species and the application of complex systems theory to issues of sustainability are topics of current interest and research. Dr. Volpe is a native of Toronto and holds a B.Sc.(Hon) and M.Sc. in Molecular Ecology from the University of Guelph, Canada and a PhD. in Population and Invasion Ecology from the University of Victoria, Canada. Following three years as a faculty member in the Dept. of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, Dr. Volpe returned to UVic in 2005 when he joined the School of Environmental Studies. He is the co-author, along with Sinclair Philip, of the Slow Food Canada Wild Salmon Manifesto.