Mike Blanchfield is the Director of Energy and Global Affairs for the Public Policy Forum. Mike is an award-winning author and journalist who spent decades covering international affairs, politics, defence, security, trade and development for major Canadian news outlets. 

He has been based on Parliament Hill since 1998 but his reporting has taken him around the world, to the front lines of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to conflict and disaster zones in Africa and Asia. He extensively covered the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement during the Trump administration and the creation of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. He has had numerous reporting assignments in Washington, D.C. from the contentious 2000 U.S. Presidential election that took him to several states, to anchoring the then Southam News newspaper chain’s coverage of the 9/11 attacks, to the Oval Office in 2019 to witness some memorable moments between Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump. He has travelled the world with four Canadian prime ministers, covering official visits and almost every permutation of multilateral summitry. He is the co-author (with Fen Osler Hampson) of the award-winning The Two Michaels: Innocent Canadian Captives and High Stakes Espionage in the US-China Cyber War and is the author of Swingback: Getting Along in the World with Harper and Trudeau.   

He won the 2013 R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship. He has also taught reporting techniques at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, where he received a Master of Journalism.