Hello. My name is Ryan Banfield. In the world of Canadian government affairs, I am both a rising professional and an enthusiastic, passionate fan.
I was born in Toronto and grew up in Orangeville, Ontario and Richmond Hill, Ontario. When I was in high school, the popularization of politics in the mid-2010s introduced me to the complex and fascinating world of government affairs. This caused a deep interest in public policy to develop within me. Like many other young people, I gravitated towards government affairs because I believed that public policy has the potential to help improve the lives of large numbers of people.
My passion for policy led me to dedicate my professional career to the Government of Canada. I decided to pursue a Joint Honours Bachelor’s of Social Science degree in Public Administration and Political Science at the University of Ottawa with the intention of using that to help me build a career as a policymaker within the federal government. My interest in public sector affairs has only grown ever since.
In 2021, I got my first job in the federal government as a policy analyst working for Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC). In this job, I mainly conducted research that informed the development of new proposals for funding programs that are meant to strengthen First Nations governments across Canada. I was also invited to deliver an informal presentation on the current state of homelessness in Canada during a lunch-and-learn session.
In 2022, I returned to the federal government as a policy analyst working for the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). At that time, the agency’s governance committees had already restructured and expanded to deal with the worst periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, the changing nature of the pandemic as well as the uncertainty regarding how the pandemic will trend in the future caused the agency’s committees to restructure themselves again. I was involved in writing policy documents that helped the governance committees in this restructuring process by giving them resources to clarify their responsibilities and rules to make running committee meetings easier. It was here that I co-wrote my first briefing note, which is an important milestone for any federal government analyst.
In the summer of 2022, I accomplished my goal of joining my dream agency: the Privy Council Office (PCO). This is where I continue to work today. As a member of PCO’s Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) team, I am responsible for handling internal records on a myriad of topics and taking these records through the process that prepares them to be released to the public. My work with the government’s internal records mainly involves organizing, sorting, labeling and uploading them, and communicating with experts to decide how best to redact and release the records’ text in accordance with the law. While I am not a policy analyst at PCO, this job has nonetheless given me opportunities to create and revise internal policies. I really enjoy this job because it allows me to keep the federal government transparent. I always find it satisfying whenever I am able to release a large amount of information that was previously hidden from the public because it means that I am helping to educate people about the true nature of government. The biggest lesson that I learned from my time at PCO is that, no matter how high-ranking and professional a part of government may be, it will always be defined and shaped by the imperfect humanity of its staff.
I have also dedicated a large amount of time to volunteer activities. While in university, I volunteered at the soup kitchen within St. Joseph’s Parish and the University of Ottawa Students’ Union Food Bank. I participated in this work because I wanted to gain direct experience in helping people of a wide variety of demographics experiencing financial difficulties, knowing that this would help to shape my understanding of what financial and social instability is like in practice. By gaining a better understanding of the people who seek the help of philanthropic services in urban society, including what they need and what they want, I seek to use this understanding to inform my future work on federal social policies that are meant to help these people.
Ever since I completed my undergraduate degree, I have dedicated my spare time to further volunteer work, this time in the realm of advocacy. Most notably, I am a member of the Ottawa Youth Council, which was established by the City of Ottawa with the mandate of enabling youth to advocate for their interests to city officials. I am very excited to propose reforms to key social policy issues to city officials and to be a voice for youth interests and municipal policy change in public speaking engagements. I have also organized multiple events on behalf of the Ottawa Youth Council that promote civic engagement among youth, such as a policy hackathon of which I led the planning efforts. Furthermore, by getting involved in municipal politics, I seek to understand how the federal government can efficiently engage with municipal governments to jointly implement social policies that help people on a local level.
My perspective on government affairs has been shaped by my experiences, and I have seen a lot, often from the inside. I was a student journalist during the 2019 federal election campaign, I worked for CIRNAC when several First Nations governments began searching for unmarked graves near former residential schools, I worked for PHAC as the rise and fall of the Omicron variant changed the COVID-19 pandemic and prompted PHAC to change in turn, I worked for the PCO ATIP team at the time when Parliament was studying the Access to Information Act and seeking insight from current and former PCO and ATIP officials, and I supported PCO’s efforts to release documents relating the the March 2025 government transition. This has given me an intimate knowledge and understanding of how government works, not just through its formal processes but also through its informal norms, conventions and cultures.
My main career goal is to create federal policies and programs that address homelessness, poverty and addiction. This is the biggest reason why I have volunteered at St. Joe’s Soup Kitchen, the University of Ottawa Students’ Union Food Bank and the Ottawa Youth Council. I seek an understanding of the needs, desires and experiences of the most vulnerable people in society in order to eventually become a more competent crafter of policies and programs that are intended to help those people become safer, become healthier, build wealth and experience a higher quality of life.
Ultimately, throughout my entire adult life, I have sought to participate in government affairs and to invest my time in efforts that have the potential to help people in some way. I continue to have passion for my work because I am doing what I want to do in life. Wherever the next few years take me, I will be up to the challenge.
My Work Experience
| Period Employed | Job Title | Employer | General Responsibilities |
| January, 2024 to present | Member of the Ottawa Youth Council | Youth Ottawa | Advocate for the interests of youth in Ottawa via consultations with city officials and via public speaking engagements. Organize events to promote civic engagement among youth. |
| September to December, 2022; May to August, 2023; January, 2024 to present | ATIP Analyst | Privy Council Office | Prepare, organize, sort, label, upload, send and redact internal documents that are bound to be released to the public. Provide advice on what information to withhold and release. Create policy documents for dealing with unique requests for information. |
| January, 2022 to April, 2022 | Policy Analyst | Public Health Agency of Canada | Draft and edit documents that help the agency’s governance committees to restructure themselves and clarify their processes. |
| May to August, 2021 | Fiscal Policy Analyst | Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada | Conduct open source research to inform new funding program proposals. |
| May to August, 2020 | Host | CivNews (Self) | Research and read out news reports and talk to guests during interviews. |
| September, 2019 to August, 2020 | Journalist | The Fulcrum | Schedule and conduct interviews and write articles that present those interviews. |
| April to August, 2018; and April to August, 2019 | Customer Service Representative | Terra Greenhouses | Transport items to customers’ cars, deliver items to customers’ houses and organize and maintain the store. |
Photo originally by Jeangagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Contact
If you want to connect with Ryan, you can email him at ryanbanfield@yahoo.ca or contact him via his LinkedIn profile.
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