Adam Chapnick's Newsletter - December 2023
Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. I hope to use it to update you on what I’ve been thinking and speaking about, where I’m speaking next, and people and issues that have caught my attention.
I have spent most of the last three months in the classroom, primarily with the Canadian Forces College's cohort of colonels, naval captains, and public service executives, who inevitably teach me far more about the Canadian government than I could ever teach them. I have also been lecturing to our program that caters to majors and lieutenant-commanders and am now teaching a small group of them an elective course in the history of Canadian foreign policy. I teach that course almost exclusively by case study, which I continue to find to be the most effective way of engaging professionals who tend to thrive when given the opportunity to apply what they are learning to quasi- if not real-world situations. It has been a wonderfully fulfilling and utterly exhausting fall, and I have just begun the process of catching up on some of the things I should have read, and written, over the last little while.
Publications
I suspect that I have never written less over a three-month period than I have since my last newsletter. The reason, I think, is that I am now dedicating close to 3 hours per week to improving my French. I have always been able to read French well enough to know when I need to ask a real French-speaker for help, but it has become increasingly clear to me during my time at the (officially bilingual) Canadian Forces College that, even though I was hired into an 'English-essential' position, I have done my francophone students a disservice because I have been unable to communicate with them effectively (or even just make them comfortable communicating with me) in their official language of choice. A couple of years ago, I hired a graduate student to have 30-minute conversations in French with me once a week, but he was too nice to me (he did not correct me enough) and I didn't feel I was making sufficient progress. 20-30 daily minutes of Duolingo, plus a weekly Radio-Canada newsletter, and now attendance at some of the bilingual classes taught here at the CFC seem to be helping. The only writing I have therefore done over these last three months was a brief set of opening remarks for testimony I gave to the House of Commons' Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. (The meeting begins when the recording reaches 17.27.40.)
In the Media
I did do a bit more media work. I spoke with a CBC journalist about the state of Canadian foreign policy, and covered similar themes on the And Another Thing podcast. I was interviewed over email by Rediff.com in Mumbai about the state of Canada-India relations. I spoke to Zoomer Radio in Toronto about the impact of pending cuts to the Canadian defence budget. And I spoke to Neil Moss, a great journalist at The Hill Times, about Foreign Minister Joly’s major foreign policy speeches of 30 October and 1 November.
Presentations and Speeches in the Community
Having spent much of the last year contributing to a series of seminars organized by the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy on the state of Canadian foreign policy, I was pleased to speak about Canada’s national interests as part of one of their panels (at 1:17) in the period leading up to the launch of their report: True North: A Canadian Foreign Policy that Puts the National Interest First. I also returned to the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies University Lecture Series, offering lectures on Canadian defence policy to the St. George and Markham campuses. If you, or your organization, is looking for a speaker, you can contact me here. You can find a list of the topics I speak about most often here.
Upcoming Talks
I'll be speaking to the Oakville campus of the UofT series next week. In January, I'll be discussing Canadian history via Zoom with a group from The University of the Third Age in Cambridge, UK. Later that same day, I am scheduled to speak about Canadian multiculturalism at the general meeting of the East York Probus Club. In February, I will be returning to the University Women's Club of North York for a Canadian history lecture.
What I've been Reading
I have always enjoyed David Gooblar's teaching columns for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I finally found the time to read his The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching. It's a good, practical book. I don't agree with Gooblar on everything (he's more comfortable than I am mixing teaching with advocacy, for example), but I love his idea of using part of your last session to allow undergraduates to write a letter to next year's students with advice about how to succeed in your class (pp.73-75). And if you want to understand one of the (many) reasons why the federal Liberals have struggled to sell enough Canadians on their environmental reform strategy, take a look at this thoughtful piece by the Institute for Research and Public Policy's Rachel Samson.
Scattered Thoughts
At some point this fall, I finally realized how badly the environmental reform movement has been failing rural Canadians. Most climate change policy in this country is designed with city-folk like me in mind. Carbon pricing is the most obvious example, but there are others. The current government attempted to recognize how much harder it is for rural Canadians to find alternatives to fossil fuels by allocating a them slightly larger quarterly rebate, but that allocation is much too small. When governments (and environmentalists) ask something of citizens, they must do so with so-called clean hands. In other words, the sacrifice that they ask for should be less than that they commit to making themselves. It seems to me that too many climate change advocates inside and outside of government do not need to work as hard as rural Canadians to reduce their carbon footprints. This fact makes for ineffective public policy. Don't get me wrong: I continue to believe that carbon pricing is the most efficient policy tool available to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, identify new energy efficiencies, and transform our economy into something more resilient and productive, but Ottawa's approach has lacked sufficient empathy, and if the leader of the opposition is ultimately successful in 'axing the tax,' all Canadians will, literally, pay the price as the cost of reducing our emissions (likely via regulation and hidden charges) increases.
When this government moves on, I think there will be a story to be told about our prime minister's seeming lack of close relationships with other global leaders. As I have written and said before, I think that this government has gotten the most important foreign policy file - relations with the United States - as right as they possibly could have. And most of my concerns about the Liberals' foreign policy were concerns I also had with that of their Conservative predecessors. But Jean Chretien was revered by leaders of a number of smaller countries around the time of the Iraq war (admittedly, it was not so much for his foreign policy as it was for his political acumen in having won three consecutive majority governments). Paul Martin had the ear of countless international leaders through his G20 work. And while Stephen Harper certainly alienated a number of world leaders (most notably President Obama), he was also close with some of those who shared his ideological predilections. Perhaps I've missed something, but it does not seem to me that the current prime minister has built similarly durable relationships with anyone other than, perhaps, President Biden, and I don't think that helps us when countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and now India treat this country like a doormat. Prime Minister Trudeau has strong social skills and, as much as some of his political opponents have tried to claim otherwise, he is not an intellectual lightweight by any means. He has also won three free an fair elections, and yet it seems to me that when Canada looks for allies (other than the United States), we have to look pretty hard.