Adam Chapnick's Newsletter - December 2024
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 one class left to teach this term, and I have already begun to miss the classroom. My work with the Canadian Forces College’s more senior course, the National Security Programme, is now finished, and I am nearly halfway through a Canadian foreign policy elective that I teach in the Joint Command and Staff Programme, which caters to high-performing officers with 10-15 years experience. Drawing from the teaching and learning literature, I am trying something new with the Canadian foreign policy folks this year - we start each class with a few minutes of discussion about their most significant take-aways from the previous week. This warm-up activity reinforces the previous session’s learning, primes them for the pending discussion, and makes it that much easier to identify links between the classes and larger themes in general. While I’ll need feedback from the group to confirm for certain, my feeling is that this 5-10 minute activity is well-worth the time. It puts folks in the right head-space to get into the assigned material and our discussions seem to be richer for it.
Although I’ve been in the classroom almost constantly, there has somehow also been enough time to do a fair bit of other work. I’ve had fascinating conversations with staff from Global Affairs Canada, the British High Commission and the Japanese Embassy over the last three months and am trying to put together a blog on the value of these professional-academic interactions. A field trip to Ottawa with the senior course to hear from deputy ministers and other federal leaders was also, as it is every year, eye-opening. My work on the history of the office of the National Security Advisor with Vincent Rigby continues, and we hope to finish our interviews (and start writing) before the end of the winter. Our paper will be informed by at least one of the 9 access to information requests we have submitted, which finally arrived - six months later. Hopefully, we will receive some of the others soon.
Publications
After more years than I’d like to count, my book with Asa McKercher, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy, was finally released by Oxford University Press in October. (For those who don’t know Asa, University Affairs recently published a great feature on him.) Because we are working with OUP USA (OUP Canada stopped publishing textbooks while we were writing ours), we have faced some early stumbling blocks in terms of making the book accessible. As of today, if you want to purchase it in Canada, the only place I can suggest is the University of Toronto Bookstore. The promotion folks at Oxford have assured us, however, that they are working on making our book more widely available in its most obvious market. I look forward to offering better news in the new year. For now, however, I can offer readers of this newsletter a 30% discount code if you live in the US or the UK and buy through the Oxford website. Please use the code AUFLY30 when you check out. Asa and I wrote two articles for The Conversation that draw lessons from the book: “Why Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau have taken the same tepid approach to global affairs,” and “Adios amigos? What Trump 2.0 means for Canada and Mexico.” For those who aren’t familiar with it, The Conversation is a website explicitly dedicated to making academic research accessible to a non-academic audience. The politics editor, Lee-Anne Goodman, is first-rate, and an absolute pleasure to work with.
Blog
Because I’ve been writing for The Conversation, I’ve had less time to blog. Since my last newsletter, I have (once again) lamented the lack of civility among our elected parliamentarians, been disappointed by parliamentary discussions of the situation in the Middle East, and offered an outsider’s take on the results of the US election.
In the Media
In terms of media work, I spoke with El Periodico de España about the future of the United Nations; with a CBC reporter about the growing challenges facing Canadian foreign policy practitioners; with CKNW in Vancouver about the state of Canadian foreign policy; and with The China Daily about the potential impact of the US election on Canadian foreign policy.
Presentations and Speeches in the Community
The fall always seems to offer plenty of opportunities to speak about Canada and its place in the world. Add to that the release of Canada First, Not Canada Alone, and I’ve been quite active in the public sphere. In October, I was part of the International Issues Discussion series at Toronto Metropolitan University. The event, coordinated by the master-teacher Arne Kislenko, was titled: “Ready or Not? Canada’s Military and the Changing Nature of Warfare.” I spoke about the history of Canada foreign policy as part of the History Matters / Valorisons Notre Histoire series hosted by the Historical Section of Global Affairs Canada. I spoke about the state of Canadian foreign policy at a book launch at the Munk Centre that was hosted by the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, where I recently became a senior fellow. I covered similar issues in a talk at the Canadian International Council - Toronto Branch’s annual meeting. I spoke about Canadian trade policy to the Probus Club of Mississauga South. And I discussed Canada-US relations at the downtown campus of the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies’ University Lecture Series.
Upcoming Talks
The School of Continuing Studies has additional campuses in Markham and Oakville, and I’ll be giving the same Canada-US relations lecture at both of them later this month. While I don’t have any other lectures booked through February, I am in discussions with the Canadian International Council to do a series of book talks in branches across the western part of the country in the spring. As usual, 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.
What I’ve been Reading
It’s particularly hard to read books while I’m teaching so extensively, but I did manage to finish Joshua Eyler’s Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It. The book was more focused on secondary school education than I had expected, so it was of less practical use for me, although I do see evidence of Eyler’s observations about high schoolers’ obsession with grades and the detrimental impact of such a focus in my teenaged daughter. What I have come to realize, however, is that the major impediment to eliminating grades at any level of education is our collective discomfort with failing people. In theory, it makes perfect sense to focus exclusively on learning. Doing so, however, requires instructors to respond when students have not met learning outcomes, and very few teachers (and school administrators) are prepared to do that. I can use specifications grading at the Canadian Forces College in large part because I am blessed with an extraordinary professional, adult student population that would not be loaded onto the program if they were not overwhelmingly capable. Barring a personal or family crisis, the odds of any of my students failing to meet the professional learning outcomes of my course are close to nil. That cannot be said of a random group of 15 year-olds facing untold personal pressures, or even for a group of 500 first-year university students each of whom will have had a profoundly different high school learning experience. So I’m all for taking the emphasis off of grading, and ‘ungrading’ whenever possible, but I do not think that we as a society are truly ready to embrace such strategies full-tilt.
I’m also nearly finished Jared Cooney Horvath’s Stop Talking, Start Influencing which is an excellent book that explains the science behind best practices in teaching and learning in language that anyone can understand. If you teach - understood in the broadest sense - and are looking for a good self-help or professional development book, check it out.
Scattered Thoughts
When Jagmeet Singh announced that the NDP was revisiting its support for the carbon tax, PM Trudeau accused him of “walking away from progressive values.” Although I understand that the prime minister was upset, I found his accusation bizarre. Carbon pricing is a profoundly conservative approach to addressing climate change. It is a market-driven policy that relies on the freedom of individuals to make choices that respond to incentives. Singh might well have been backing away from a real commitment to environmental reform, but there’s nothing progressive about carbon pricing as a response to climate change.
When Pierre Poilievre accused Jagmeet Singh of refusing to bring down the Trudeau government because he wanted to make sure that he had been an MP long enough to accrue a pension, I wonder why Singh did not simply respond: ‘I’ll give up my federal pension if you give up yours.’
I am a strong supporter of increasing investments in Canadian defence and security, but I caution anyone who believes that meeting NATO’s 2% of GDP target for defence spending will somehow cause all of the criticism of Canada’s neglect of its armed forces to disappear. So long as America spends a higher percentage of its GDP on defence than we do, President Trump will not hesitate for a moment to demand that we spend more.
The end of the decriminalization of hard drugs experiment in BC is, at least to me, an excellent example of the challenges we have discussing public policy issues seriously in an age of soundbites. Decriminalization was brought in to address a specific problem: folks who had broken the law while under the throes of addiction but had now cleaned up their lives were being prevented from obtaining gainful employment because of their criminal records. Decriminalization was intended to remove one of the greatest barriers to a full recovery - the opportunity to find meaningful employment and lead a ‘normal’ life. To that end, it was working: folks who committed crimes while they were high did not end up with criminal records that could later hold them back on account of their actions.
The problem with the decriminalization experiment was two-fold. First, it was sold as a step towards managing BC’s drug crisis and thus judged on a standard only tangentially related to its intent. Decriminalization was not designed to help current drug users; its benefits only accrued to people already in recovery. Blaming decriminalization for the worsening of BC’s drug crisis therefore doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Second, the policy was not properly coordinated with BC law enforcement. Law enforcement seemed to interpret (rightly or wrongly) decriminalization as preventing officers from arresting folks who were high on illicit drugs for just about anything. Society, not just in BC, has made it clear that, no matter how much empathy we have for people suffering from addiction, they cannot be permitted to undermine the health, safety, and security of the rest of us, and particularly of those who rely on public services and spaces. Law enforcement could not square this circle, which made continuing along the same path impossible.
If decriminalization is off the table, we have to find another way to prevent folks who have recovered from their addictions from being given a lifetime punishment of poor employment prospects. The best (albeit incomplete) solution I can think of it to (1) change whatever regulations are necessary to make it easier for former users to have their records expunged of crimes committed while they were high (with whatever caveats are necessary for particularly violent crimes); and (2) attach legal experts in expungement to every drug treatment and recovery centre so that folks who have started to turn their lives around have easy and direct access to the legal supports necessary to get their records expunged as quickly as possible. BC’s experiment failed, but the thinking underpinning decriminalization remains entirely reasonable. It will be a real shame if we throw out the baby with the bathwater.