He served as co-chair of the Canada-United States Inter-Parliamentary Group and as a senior officer of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly for over a decade.

Grafstein is also known as one of the founders of CityTV, MTV-Multilingual (now Omni TV), YTV, and a series of other media companies in Canada, the United States, South America, and Europe.

[citation needed] He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Western Ontario in 1955, where was active in debates and acted in local theatre and musicals.

[2] Since his retirement from the Senate on January 2, 2010, Grafstein has served as counsel to Minden Gross LLP in Toronto, a firm he joined in 1960.

[5] During 1966-1968 he served in Ottawa as executive assistant to John Turner, then Registrar General of Canada, and later as special advisor to the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs during its founding period.

[4] From 1974 to 1986, he co-founded and was president of Red Leaf Communications Company, the advertising consortium for the Liberal Party of Canada during national elections.

[citation needed] In July 2007, Grafstein was elected vice president of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly,[2] the world's largest parliamentary organization dedicated to human rights, democratic rights, economic security and co-operation (after he had served as its treasurer for six years), and served as president of the Liberal, Democratic Reform Group there for a decade.

He served on the OSCE election monitoring missions throughout Eastern Europe[10] and, more recently, in Georgia, Ukraine and Montenegro, and on resolving "frozen foreign conflicts.

[citation needed] Grafstein co-chaired Middle East Economic Partnership forums held throughout Europe and across the Mediterranean.

[citation needed] He served on many Parliamentary Friendship Groups in Europe (east and west), Asia, North Africa and South America.

[citation needed] In April 2009, Grafstein helped organize a counter-conference in New York City in the follow-up UN Human Rights Conference on Durban, held in Geneva, to combat antisemitism and lectured on the topic across Europe, Canada, and the United States.

[citation needed] In May 2009, while he was a senator, he helped organize and was a keynote speaker at the OSCE PA Economic Conference in Dublin, Ireland.

[10] Grafstein had wide-ranging legal and business experience in all aspects of media, including television, cable, radio, telephony, telecommunications microwave, high speed wireless data transmission, advertising, production, distribution, publishing, and financing.

He was a co-founder of a range of media companies, especially broadcasting/communications/ publication enterprises, including: CUC Broadcasting Limited[1] (Canada's fifth largest cable MSO before it was acquired by Shaw Communications in 1995, now Canada's second largest cable MSO); national specialty TV channels in lifestyle, youth (YTV) and music; CityTV (Canada's first independent UHF station); MTV-Multilingual Television (Toronto) (Canada's first independent multilingual broadcasting station – now OMNI TV);[13] CUC Cablevision (UK) Limited (Telecential) (now part of one of the United Kingdom's larger cable MSOs); Northern Communications, Ontario a Northern Ontario Company, comprising cable, TV (CBC and CTV) and radio stations – French and English.

[16] For over a decade, Grafstein served on the Board of the League for Human Rights of B'nai B'rith and the Joint Community Relations Committee of Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s.

"[2] In 2001, Grafstein was given the War Chief's tomahawk of the Northern Peigan Tribe (Blackfoot Confederacy) of Alberta for advancing the cause of clean drinking water on First Nations' Reserves across Canada.

[citation needed] On April 4, 2003, Grafstein co-organized, with Friends of America, a pro-Ametican rally at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto with over 1,000 participants.

[2] Headlined by the Rolling Stones, it is considered to be the largest ticketed band concert in history and was attended by almost half-a-million people.

[4] In December 2004, Grafstein co-organized "Canada for Asia", a three-hour broadcast telethon in aid of relief for tsunami victims that raised over $15,000,000.

[citation needed] On July 7, 2014, Grafstein was honoured by Chief Ron Cooper of the Mohawk Nation and presented with a handcrafted lacrosse stick.

[citation needed] His first book, Beyond Imagination, is an anthology of some of Canada's outstanding authors and poets that he edited; it published by McClelland & Stewart Inc. in 1995.

[23] His second book, The Making of the Parliamentary Poet Laureate : Based on a Private Member's Bill , was published by the Porcupine's Quill.