Brilliant minds, global challenges, collaborative solutions – these are the power of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). In this episode, Douglas Nelson speaks with their President and CEO Stephen Toope who unveils how CIFAR is breaking down research silos to tackle the world’s most complex problems, one brilliant collaboration at a time. He shares their approach to bringing together top researchers, fostering long-term partnerships, and empowering early-career researchers to pursue transformative knowledge. Dive into the innovative discoveries happening at CIFAR, from quantum physics to AI safety, and learn why advanced research is more critical than ever.
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Listen to the podcast here
Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR) With Stephen Toope, President & CEO
Our episode is a look into the leadership of one of the world’s leading minds on collaboration and what it takes to mobilize meaningful organizational change. Stephen Toope is President and CEO of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research or CIFAR. Previously, he served as the 346th Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the first non-UK national to hold the post.
He was Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, President of the University of British Columbia, and founding president of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, as well as dean of law at McGill University. Today, CIFAR is a globally influential research organization proudly based here in Canada. CIFAR mobilizes the world’s most brilliant people across disciplines and at all career stages to advance transformative knowledge and solve humanity’s biggest problems together.
In today’s global political climate, it was great to hear Stephen talk about Canada’s role in bringing the world together around challenging issues such as artificial intelligence. Our conversation heats up when we get into the institutional leader’s role in philanthropy, priority setting, and institutional change. If you ever worked in university advancement or are curious about it and if you’ve ever worked closely with an institutional leader charged with a huge organization, this is a look into the mind of one of the best, Stephen Toope. Thanks for tuning in.
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Welcome to the Discovery Pod, Stephen Toope.
Thank you. It’s great to meet you.
Understanding CIFAR’s Role In Canadian Research
It is a pleasure to have you and it is rare as I’m getting ready for these conversations that I feel so nervous and feel the need to consult with so many colleagues who have had the chance to work for you at different organizations at different times in your career. I have the questions they sent me to ask you. Some of them may not make the show. Maybe we’ll do that afterward. You are now at CIFAR. Many in our audience probably know what that is. In your words, what is CIFAR and what is its role in the Canadian research landscape?
CIFAR is the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. It has existed for over 40 years. When it was created, the goal was to allow the very top research talent in Canada to connect with the top people all around the world. We are proudly based here in Canada, but we’re a globally influential research organization. The overall purpose is to mobilize the world’s most brilliant people across disciplines and at all career stages to address some of the hardest challenges facing science and humanity, and to create transformative knowledge.
Thank you for that. When I think of CIFAR, I see it as the Canadian research voice on the international stage. Increasingly, there’s a role for Canada to play, especially with AI and the advances that are coming there. I know AI has been a big focus for CIFAR. What should Canada be focusing on? What role are we playing on that international research stage today?
For a long time now, Canada has been a major player on the research stage globally. In many ways, we are a small country compared to the US, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan, but batted above our normal weight globally in particular fields. For example, if you think about physics, it so happens that quite a number of outstanding physicists and Nobel Prize winners in the last few years have emerged from Canada.
One of the things that Canadians are good at, and it’s one of the core elements of what we do at CIFAR, is working collaboratively. Yes, we’re competitive, but as a scientific and research community, we also have a tradition of collaboration globally that is very much appreciated. It’s something that CIFAR focuses on. Essentially, we create networks. That’s what we do. We have fifteen different networks now across the whole sweep of human research endeavors. What people appreciate about the Canadians and CIFAR is our ability to convene and to allow conversations and discoveries to take place in a collaborative spirit.
Advanced Research: One of the things that Canadians are good at is working collaboratively.
That concept of convening and collaboration is a dominant theme in leading universities or universities in your case. It is a powerful force in the social profit sector today. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t have a conversation with a client or a colleague in the sector talking about that convening role and the power of convening around important issues. In your mind, what are the essential elements of being a good convener? What does that mean?
There are some specific elements that relate to the research endeavor that make convening a bit different. One of the things that is most important is allowing people to develop conversations over a period of time. You cannot develop the levels of trust to expose yourself and your science to a group that you don’t know. One of the things that we do at CIFAR is we convene over an extended period of time. Some of our programs have lasted for decades.
They’re reviewed and refreshed. There are new people who join and people who leave, but we allow people to develop relationships of trust and openness that allow them to share both the strengths of their work and the nervousness around certain elements, and to get advice and to challenge one another.
In the research field, it’s that kind of convening, not just one-offs where people get together and they present a paper and someone says, “That was very interesting. Have you thought about this?” Genuinely engaging over a period of time at the deepest levels of the work that you’re trying to undertake and having it both supported, but also profoundly challenged and being comfortable with that. That’s our form of convening.
Is the role of trust there to make people comfortable with being challenged by peers?
In part, yes. It’s a large measure. It’s to allow people not to feel that when someone is raising questions, they’re doing it only to score points or to show that they’re smarter than you are, but genuinely, to advance the research. When I go to the meetings of our networks, one of the things that routinely will be said to me by some of our fellows is, “This is the most exciting intellectual moment of my year.” They say that all the time. By that, they mean they know they’re going to come and get questioned in a productive and contributory way, not in a competitive and disabling way.
It’s encouraging people to bring their best selves to the table.
Very much so, and they do. It’s very exciting. We have a couple of programs in quantum, for example, quantum information sciences and quantum materials. When I go to the programs, I don’t understand a thing about what folks are talking about. My background is in international law, but what I can sense and what I can assess is whether they are feeling excited. Are they feeling mobilized and encouraged? Are they advancing their work? You can sense that, and the answer is almost always yes.
The Power Of Convening Ideas In University Leadership
In your years as university president and vice-chancellor at UBC and Cambridge, that power of bringing together communities and uniting people around common goals has been a hallmark of your work and your leadership. Outside of that research environment, it’s the clash of ideas and the potential of ideas. When you’re thinking of that university community, what is that role of convening and how does that play out in an institution?
One of the things that is hard in universities is getting people to open up across disciplines. I know that we’ve all tried very hard in the university world to encourage that. You will have heard interdisciplinarity. It has been a theme for the last probably twenty years. In all honesty, and I say this with the greatest respect for continuing university colleagues, it’s still tough in universities to make that happen because of our structures. Essentially, we’ve inherited largely nineteenth-century structures that have these departments. It’s very difficult sometimes to get people to work collaboratively across them.
We’ve tried centers and institutes and all sorts of things that bridge the divides of departments, but we haven’t solved that problem within the university community. One of the goals of a university president in the contemporary era is to find mechanisms to encourage colleagues to talk across disciplines and outside of their standard frameworks. There is a lot of effort on that, but one of the reasons that I’ve been most excited about CIFAR is that’s in its DNA. That is at the heart of what we do.
We have programs that have engineers, social scientists, historians, and people working in the hard natural sciences all in the same program. They have to find a language that allows them to talk with each other. That’s another reason that you have to give them time and space. It cannot happen in one meeting. These are the kinds of opportunities that we have to encourage. I know my colleagues in the universities are trying to do that, but it remains a challenge.
The Intersection Of Fundraising And Innovation In Higher Education
You’ve had a perspective that very few others have had in terms of looking at what those nineteenth-century structures do when they try to blend. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about your role at CIFAR and leading universities about fundraising. I know every academic when they get their PhD robes, they finish school, they become a faculty member, and they think, “One day I hope I get to ask somebody for a lot of money.” That’s the goal of every academic.
What we’ve seen in Canada and across the world is many of the larger donors, the $25 million, $50 million, or $100-plus million, particularly in Canada, many or most and almost all of those gifts are for things at the boundary of traditional academic disciplines. They’re about creating those centers and institutes you reference. They’re about bringing together computer science and healthcare.
They’re about bringing together engineering, healthcare, computer science, and social work. They are about bringing those smartest kids in class from all the classrooms together into a place. I’m interested in your perspective on that tension between these large gifts that come in to change the structures of institutions, how that’s working, and how that’s not always received well, but often received very well. As the leader of those organizations, how did you find that balance?
There are lots of things to unpack in that. I had the privilege of leading what was then the largest campaign in Canadian history at UBC, a $2 billion campaign, and then at Cambridge, leading the largest campaign in the United Kingdom at £2 billion. They were both successful. I’ve talked with a lot of people in the fundraising world in the United States, Canada, and Europe. One of the hardest things is to conceptualize these large gifts in ways that will genuinely advance the mission of the university, and not simply be responsive to passionate commitments that a large donor may have.
When I went to Cambridge, in particular, we had no large gift that had been conceptualized. We didn’t know what we wanted to go out and raise money for. One of the biggest endeavors within the university world is allowing ourselves to think big, and to think across disciplines and outside of boundaries.
One of the biggest endeavors within the university world is allowing ourselves to think big across disciplines and outside of boundaries. Share on XYou’re absolutely right that most mega-donors today are interested in areas that bridge outside of the traditional disciplinary boundaries. They are very passionate about that. That’s because usually, they have a set of ideas about something in the world that they would like to either improve or change. They’re coming to the university because they believe the university, correctly, is one of the great instruments for societal change. It is and at the same time, it can be quite internally conservative.
As you say, it’s bridging that desire for change with structures that sometimes are not amenable to allowing the change to emerge from inside the university. It’s possible to do. One of the ways of doing it is constructing within the university frameworks that give people permission to be bolder and not be incremental in the work that they’re doing within their own discipline. I can give you some examples of places that have done that. it’s tremendously exciting when it happens, but it is not straightforward.
In my experience, it’s often the case that donors have an interest in a particular area. Either it’s where they’ve made their wealth or it’s where they’re interested. A lot of my background is in health. There’s a health condition or the state of medicine is not sufficient to address the concern that they have. It’s often rare for a donor to say, “President, you should do this.” It’s often, “I’m interested in this area.”
Universities and research institutes either are already working on it or could, and it becomes an iterative conversation to build something. It’s that idea that the donors are coming in with, “You must do this and it must look like this.” Usually, when donors are expressing that, there’s often a faculty member who is speaking in their ear in a different conversation. It’s just my experience. You don’t have to comment on that.
I agree with you and I do want to comment because there are examples. We’ve seen them more commonly south of the border in the United States, where people have become known as donors who are trying to manipulate an institution. We’ve seen examples of that. In my experience in Canada and the United Kingdom, I have not had that happen once in my entire career.
I want to agree with you. Generally speaking, donors are coming perhaps with interests but they’re absolutely willing to be directed, guided, and encouraged to think about contributing in a way that makes sense within the framework of the organization within the university. It’s very rarely the case that they are trying to force something into an unreceptive institution.
Leadership Strategies For Overcoming Institutional Barriers
In those instances, the challenge then comes back to the university and the institution to be able to come up with that big idea and that compelling concept. That can be challenging, not just because of the structure. It’s a new way of thinking about particular issues in many cases. What’s been your approach as the leader when you have these opportunities and you clearly see what the barriers are? How do you unlock those smartest kids in class to come up with those big ideas?
You have to do that. You have to do it intentionally. I’ll give you an example from my Cambridge experience. Cambridge is one of the leading science universities in the world. It had and has some of the most spectacular work on climate change taking place anywhere. When I arrived at Cambridge, it was clear that it was diffuse, it was siloed, and we were having much less impact than we could have as an institution.
I didn’t do it on my own, but I had to think through with colleagues a mechanism to figure out how to encourage people to collaborate effectively to develop the big idea. Without going into all the details, I brought someone in from the outside as the leader because all of the internal people had their own invested interests in very particular approaches. I found I needed to have someone who was able to rise above all of that. I brought that person who is a good listener and who convened, and I personally convened.
I sat through various meetings to think through what an initiative which we ultimately called Cambridge Zero would look like. We established a framework, we sought philanthropic support, and we developed across university initiatives, building on what was already there. We did manage to transform what had been extremely siloed work into much more collaborative work. I hope, over time, that will mean that Cambridge has a much greater influence scientifically in terms of the research broadly than it would have otherwise.
It’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t. That’s impressive. How important was the fact that, as Vice Chancellor, you were sitting at that table and you were convening those conversations?
In that context, it was essential, interestingly. A dean or a provost might be able to do that as well. I’m not suggesting they couldn’t but this was meant to be such a big initiative and stretching across the entire university. The sense that the vice chancellor cared about this and wanted it to happen and was willing to do what was necessary to try to make it happen was quite important in at least the launch of that conversation. I didn’t have to get involved in all of the minutiae, other people managed that, but I did have a whole series of touchpoints coming back and reaffirming where I thought we were. I got briefed very routinely, and I would weigh in when I felt like we were getting stuck in the mud again.
Collaborative Leadership And Driving Change In Social Profit
As a leadership challenge in the social profit sector in academia, the temptation can be, “I don’t know the answer. The answer is over there. Get those people together, you tell me the answer, and I’ll take it forward.” It’s a good-faith effort often on the part of leaders, but it doesn’t develop that stickiness. What advice would you have to someone leading a national health charity or a large social profit organization needing to find a new way or a new way of conceptualizing the work that they’re doing?
In my experience, what’s been most useful is digging down into the staff of your organization and your principal supporters. When I arrived at CIFAR, we needed a strategy refresh. It’s an incredibly strong organization. I was privileged to take over something that was in good shape but needed a refresh. It’s important in those circumstances to start by listening to where people think you are, especially if you’re coming in from the outside, to understand the nature of the organization before you imagine that you’re going to come in and shift things. It’s deeply understanding.
The goal has to be to continuously convene in a number of different ways, to your point, not one-offs, but to have a series of perhaps overlapping but differentiated consultation mechanisms that allow you to extract ideas and initiatives that are often buried in the organization. They’re often there already, but they’re not allowed to bloom. You have to figure out where the shoots are and then, as the leader, the key is to tend to those shoots.
It’s to say, “I’m not just going to let it happen. I have to now engage and figure out how I can be actively supportive of changing a dynamic.” It’s not straightforward. It takes time, but it doesn’t take forever. That’s another point, especially in universities. We often think that developing a strategic initiative is going to take 3 or 5 years. It doesn’t have to be like that, but you have to give yourself the time to learn first and then to nurture.
Advanced Research: You have to give yourself time to learn first and then to nurture.
That “learn first-nurture” concept has some parallels to the relationship building associated with fundraising, as well as development.
No question. Absolutely.
The Role Of Philanthropy In Building Strong Institutions
How do you see the role of philanthropy in institution building?
It’s increasingly important in part because the pressures on government are so significant. In Canada, particularly, we have a history of imagining that the government will come in with resources to solve problems. Look, in the past it has. A lot of Canadian institutions and universities, in particular, were built on government funding. Let’s be honest. Especially in the 1960s, the money flowed extraordinarily. It cannot do that anymore. It’s not there to the same extent, and there are competing priorities.
For all organizations in the profit sector that we’re talking about, there is much more reliance on philanthropy to drive success in an organization. That’s true for my own organization. We are actively trying to rebalance. Historically, we were funded largely by the federal government, a little bit by the provinces, with a tiny bit of philanthropy. We’re now funded more like 35% to 40% by philanthropy. I would like to grow that over the next few years so that the majority of our funding comes from the philanthropic sector in Canada and outside.
Why that’s exciting is there are people out there who you might call venture philanthropists or patient capital or whatever and want to make a contribution. They are looking for opportunities. You will know in your work that a lot of this is just the matchmaking. It’s trying to help people understand what your organization does and how it could accelerate the desire that a philanthropist has to make a difference in the world.
Increasingly, we’re hearing conversations and supporting conversations of donors wanting to invest in science because they see science is under threat.
I hear this consistently. I do think that it is one of the great challenges of our era. We know that expertise generally is under threat, and science is a subset of that. Any form of expertise is under challenge. There are some good reasons for it, in the sense that perhaps we’ve had too many talking heads telling people what they should think. That doesn’t register anymore, especially in an era where media is so disaggregated. There is no single voice, etc.
There is a particular risk when you question the scientific method or imagine that science itself is only one way of imagining what is true about the world, and to have people who would simply say, “That’s what the science tells us, but I believe something different because I do, or someone else tells me I should believe something different.”
I want to be clear on this. Science doesn’t have absolute fixed answers. That’s one of the great challenges of communicating science. The scientific understanding of the world is shifting. There are mechanisms to test and to question whether our received understanding is still present or needs to be questioned and challenged, but that method of rigorous assessment is itself the value. It’s not the conclusion that’s the value, it’s the method of testing. That’s what’s under threat. Therefore, a lot of philanthropists are concerned and want to make a contribution to address that.
As you’re talking, I remember one of my professors while I was doing my master’s program at UBC. His line was always, “Be not so impressed.” Ask the questions. That’s the point, which is if you have a belief certainty against something that is asking questions, the belief certainty can win out for people who aren’t familiar with the process.
It is very much so. We’re very much in that world. There are people who are playing on that risk for their own profit and benefit.
The Importance Of Managing Expectations In Research And Innovation
The concept of science research innovation is always at the forefront of conversations about advancing the Canadian economy and advancing the country in general. You’ve been very outspoken in terms of the role of innovation, and the role of research in that as a champion for investment in the concept. One of the challenges that you’ve identified that is fascinating, and I think it has direct application to the social profit sector, is over-promising early returns. As a way of explaining the importance, organizations and individuals can lean too far forward and talk too far down the road, and it’s hard to deliver on that. Can you walk us through that a little bit?
We saw a wonderful example of this. I’m going back ways now, but during the Chretien-Martin era in the federal government, there was a tremendous set of investments made consecutively over a number of years by those governments in the research endeavor in Canada. I want to applaud that. It was necessary because Canada at the time was not operating at the level it should have been, given our population, our wealth relatively in the world, etc.
In the ‘90s, there was a tremendous set of investments. Part of the way that that was explained was that the argument was made that there is a direct correlation, maybe even causality between an investment in basic research and economic benefit. Lots of universities at the time started doing economic benefit analyses of their universities in their own settings, etc. I did them too at UBC. We all did that.
The problem is that there isn’t a direct link between the initial investment in research and the economic benefit. There are so many intermediating factors that you cannot promise that the one investment will result in benefit unless there are other elements of public policy, economic culture, etc. in place. In Canada, we had to think through, for example, what’s the relative balance of direct subsidies for the adoption of innovation in industry versus tax incentives.
In my view, we haven’t got that right over time. We also had to figure out whether there is such a thing as industrial policy. Do you pick winners or don’t you pick winners? For a long time, we said we didn’t. Recently, we’ve been picking winners like battery manufacturers. It turns out maybe that wasn’t such a great idea. It’s not going in quite the direction we imagined.
My view is that governments have to be thinking about the platforms that support economic growth, not individual firm subsidies, but that’s a personal view. My point is all across the spectrum, there are so many different points at which there have to be good decisions taken. The universities or other research elements cannot make those decisions. They’re public-sector decisions.
Governments have to be thinking about the platforms that support economic growth, not individual firm subsidies. Share on XFor a university president to promise, “You invest a hundred million in me, and ten years from now, there is going to be this industry in British Columbia or Ontario or Quebec.” You cannot do that. To make that claim undermines confidence in the original investment. The point is that you have to still make those initial investments, or you never even have the chance to be at the forefront of innovation and the future economy.
One of the challenges that a lot of organizations face in health research, innovation, and technology is how you make incremental progress sound revolutionary. Those are the stories and narratives that a lot of large organizations that are raising hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in Canada today are telling. They’re talking about transformation. Having spent my life in institutions and grown up as a fundraiser, I believe in institutions and their ability to transform areas and concepts, though not always themselves.
Making that a compelling case for donors, venture philanthropists, and those people looking to make a significant impact, communicating what incremental progress looks like, how hard it is to do that, and how challenging it is to do that on a consistent basis is revolutionary. That is transformative, but it’s hard to put that in a tweet.
One of the reasons I never went on Twitter or X is because you cannot do that. I would say two things. First, you’re right. It is hard to convey the difficult slog of doing research that produces genuinely new knowledge. In many cases, it is incremental. My view is you have to be careful not to over-promise.
I dislike campaigns when they make claims like, “You invest your $200 million and we’re going to cure cancer.” I’m sorry, that is not going to happen. No one institution is going to do that, and it’s such a complicated set of issues. It is going to take time, and you can make real progress, and it’s worth investing, but you’re not going to get the cure. I’ll leave it at that. I do think, therefore, that it’s important to try to convey a better understanding of how research works. A lot of people don’t understand it. I don’t blame them, they’ve never been in the world. It is our responsibility as people who are in this world to try and do a better job of explaining it.
Advanced Research: Try to convey a better understanding of how research actually works. It is our responsibility as people in this world to try and do a better job of explaining it.
Can I add my second point though? One of the things I love about being at CIFAR is that our investments are genuinely designed to be at the forefront and transformative. We try hard not to be doing those incremental things. They’re hugely important and they have to be done, but CIFAR’s role is actually to be absolutely on the horizon and to be thinking about the hardest questions and looking at them in fundamentally different ways. That’s why we bring people across disciplines to do that. That’s our raison d’etre.
That’s incredible. Anyone who’s looked into CIFAR heard from anyone who’s been involved in your networks or involved in the research, you see these researchers talking about CIFAR. You hear them talking about it. It’s like it’s their eighth birthday and they’ve got the shiny bike they always wanted. There is joy and enthusiasm that comes through because they’re able to do something through CIFAR that they’re not able to do anywhere else.
One of the things that I’m finding most exciting is that our programs have been expanding in the last couple of years to support early career researchers who want to do exactly that. I’m recently appointed assistant professor not to do only the incremental stuff that is going to move you steadily towards your tenure. Yet so many of them want to be bolder.
We’re trying to find ways to collaborate with other funders. We’re not alone in this. We work with Schmidt Sciences out of the US, the Sloan Foundation, and the Jacobs Foundation in Switzerland. We’re trying to convene funders for early career researchers to help support them in being bolder. It’s something important and it is exciting. You use the term joy and I use that too. It is exactly the spirit. There is a joy in the discovery that takes place that is infectious.
The Future Of Research Innovation And Leadership
The infectious joy that you’re sharing about CIFAR and the importance of research innovation is making me feel taller and is a great way to come to the end of our conversation. What are you looking forward to?
I’m looking forward to tremendous opportunities that are being unlocked in the world right now. It is a terribly difficult world. I don’t want to underplay this. My area is international law, and when I look at the world, you could very easily start to feel pretty despondent. Some bad things are happening, and I won’t go into the specifics, but everyone can imagine some of those things. Yet, I’m also constantly being confronted with a world of opportunity, where I see people working on genuinely tough challenges and making progress.
The world is a bit of a mess, but it is also a place of tremendous discovery and opportunity. Share on XA great example is artificial intelligence. There are risks and they have to be assessed. CIFAR is working on a program called the Canadian AI Safety Institute. We’re running a whole research program on AI safety, but what AI could do to unlock opportunities for discovery in science is extraordinary and it’s already happening. We’re seeing accelerated drug discovery. We’re seeing the creation of radical new materials in quantum with the aid of artificial intelligence. Yes, there are great risks. Yes, the world is a bit of a mess, but it’s also a place of tremendous discovery and opportunity.
Our audience should take that into their day, their week, their month, and their year. That is very inspiring. Thank you so much for ending on that note, for the work you do at CIFAR, and for being a part of the Discovery Pod today.
Thanks very much, Doug.
Important Links
- Stephen Toope – CIFAR
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation
- Schmidt Sciences
- Sloan Foundation
- Jacobs Foundation
- Canadian AI Safety Institute
About Stephen Toope
Stephen J Toope OC, FRSC, LLD is President and CEO of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Previously, he served as the 346th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the first non-UK national to hold the post. He was Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, President of the University of British Columbia, President of Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, and Dean of Law at McGill University.
A graduate in history and literature from Harvard, and in civil law and common law from McGill, Toope went on to complete a PhD in International Law at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Toope’s public service includes Chairing the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, serving as Fact Finder for the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Government Officials in relation to Maher Arar, being a UN Election Observer the first Post-apartheid elections in South Africa, and sitting on the Boards of the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC).
Not-for-profit sector contributions have included chairing or serving on the Boards of the Public Policy Forum, the Conference Board of Canada, The Royal Conservatory of Music, The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund of the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Canadian Human Rights Foundation (now Equitas).
Toope has written or co-authored three books on international law, and publishes in global journals on human rights, international dispute resolution, international environmental law, the use of force, and international legal theory. He has also lectured at universities around the world.
Awarded many honorary degrees, Toope was elected to the prestigious Institut de droit international, made an honorary Bencher of Middle Temple in London, and elected to honorary fellowships in numerous academic institutions in Canada and the UK. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2019 and an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2015.
Toope is married to Paula Rosen, a speech language pathologist. They have three adult children and three grandchildren.
