Concordia students take home top prize at National Public Administration Case Competition

A team of students from Concordia’s Master’s in Public Policy and Public Administration (MPPPA) has once again won gold at the National Public Administration Case Competition. Created by the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration, the annual event highlights Canada’s public administration programs and offers students hands-on learning experiences.

This is the second consecutive year that a Concordia team has taken home the top award, known as the Robert Shepherd Prize for Best Presentation. The achievement marks a first in the competition’s 15-year history.

The winning team includes grad students Naomi Abramovich, Ruxandra Chirila, Katherine Chisholm, Olivia Integlia and Brendan Metrakos. Their coaches were Meghan Joy, director of the MPPPA program; Joe Faragone, public servant in residence; and Geoffrey Kelley, former Minister of the National Assembly, cabinet minister, and until December 2025, Indigenous governance specialist-in-residence at Concordia.

“This competition was one of the educational opportunities I was most looking forward to in the MPPPA program,” Chirila says. “It's really a kind of policy Olympics: the culmination of all the policy analysis skills we learned in our classes and the biggest challenge of our studies.

“We were in shock from the moment the announcer said that, for the first time in the competition's history, a school had won back-to-back for the top prize. I am incredibly proud of my team and all the work we put into preparing for the competition and performing at our best,” she says.

A complicated case

Each year, teams of four presenters plus one alternate spend 10 days assessing a current public administration case to develop the most effective solutions. Teams are then given 30 minutes to deliver their presentations to a panel of judges, with time limits strictly enforced.

“My most memorable moment was watching the team deliver their presentation on Saturday, the day of the competition,” Joy says. “We met Wednesday evening and they were still in brainstorming mode around their solution, which I will admit made me a little nervous. The way they pulled off such a professional and seamless presentation in only a few days was so impressive!”

Held on February 21, this year’s event required participants to identify Canada’s most urgent national security priorities over the next four years and propose implementable interventions.

“It was a complicated case that raised hard questions from the judges, but the Concordia team addressed it with intelligence and confidence,” says Daniel Salée, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science.

The National Public Administration Case Competition is supported by the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, the Canada School of Public Service, and the Institute for Research on Public Policy.

Learn more about the Master’s in Public Policy and Public Administration program at Concordia.