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’ve spent much of the last three months in the classroom, working primarily with the Canadian Forces College’s National Security Program in an effort to help senior military officers and public service personnel understand how the Canadian government makes decisions at the strategic-level.

I frame the course around a single question: how come (my) great policy idea was never accepted by ‘The Centre’ (i.e., the Canadian government) but that clearly inferior one was? The course is designed as a series of roadblocks that your great policy idea must navigate through in order to be affirmed by Ottawa. Once we have cleared all of the roadblocks, we head to Ottawa for a week for Chatham House Rule discussions with senior leaders inside the Canadian government. The trip is always a highlight, made possible by the incredible legwork undertaken by some of the Canadian Forces College staff. For someone like me who got into this business to teach, teaching this course is like winning the lottery every year.

Now that it is over, my teaching time moves to the Joint Command and Staff Program, where a group of 12 majors, lieutenant-commanders, and one public servant are working through a series of case studies in the history of Canadian international policy with me. We dealt with Canada’s response to South African Apartheid this week, and will be examining the Canadian response to the Kosovo crisis next week. The group is energetic, committed, and leaves me feeling very good about the future leadership of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Outside of the classroom, it looks like the history of the Office of the National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister that Vincent Rigby and I have been working on for what feels like a lifetime will be released this month by the Centre for International Governance Innovation. The release will be treated like a soft launch, and CIGI is planning a proper launch for it in the new year.

One final bit of news: it is possible that I will be moving this newsletter to a different platform in the new year. This should not change anything for you if you are on my mailing list; you will simply be notified of this newsletter differently. I’ve been telling myself to make this change for over a year. Now that I’ve put it in print, it might actually happen.

Publications

Although I have not been writing much, back in October, I submitted what would otherwise have been an extended blog to The Hill Times in an attempt to explain and defend Prime Minister Carney’s heavy travel schedule. Because it is protected by a paywall, I’ve posted a draft version to my blog. The essay that I submitted to International Journal should be published in the new year. Between now and then, I’ve agreed to write a review essay for another publication on a couple of books focused on Canada’s prime ministers.

In the Media

I spoke to a journalist from The Hill Times about a likely forthcoming second G7 foreign ministers meeting, about partisan diplomatic appointments, and about Canada’s tenure as G7 president. I spoke reporters from Haaretz and The China Daily about Canada-US relations. And I spoke to the Canadian Press about partisan diplomatic appointments.

I have also hired a research assistant to compile a database of partisan diplomatic appointments. I plan to write about what the data say in the future.

Presentations and Speeches in the Community

I spoke to Third Age Learning Lakehead about Canadian foreign policy. I was privileged to speak to the Executive MBA Program from Dublin City University Business School about Canada-US relations. I spoke about Canadian defence policy at a C.D. Howe Institute conference and about national mobilization at an event held by the Canadian Materiel Support Group in Ottawa. Finally, for only the second time in my career, I had to cancel a talk (at the Westway Probus Club) because of illness. I hated doing it, but I was coughing so badly at the time that I couldn’t get through a sentence. (Coincidentally, I was teaching online during my illness so I didn’t miss any classes.)

Upcoming Talks

I’ll be speaking to the Canadian Armed Forces 4 Health Services Group Clinical Council about Canada in the world next week. In the new year, I’ll be giving two online lectures (on Canadian trade policy and Canadian foreign policy) as part of the Bluewater Association for Lifelong Lecture Series.

As always, 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 (other than the work of my students…)

Thanks to the proliferation of AI, I’ve replaced what used to be a take-home exam in one of my courses with an oral exam. I found this article by Catherine Hartmann helpful as I tried to figure out best practices.

Justin Ling’s The 51st State Votes is a helpful summary of the 2025 election so long as you can handle his visceral dislike for all things Pierre Poilievre. Ling - who was an excellent when he spoke to one of the CFC programs - is not one to hide his opinions.

I find that there are a lot of links between teaching and behavioral economics, so when I hear about books that combine insight from psychology with anything finance-related, I try to take a look. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel was excellent. I found his differentiation between being rich and being wealthy particularly insightful: “Wealth is an option not yet taken to buy something later. Its value lies in offering you options, flexibility, and growth to one day purchase more stuff than you could right now,” he explains. “It is easy to find rich models [because they advertise their largesse]. It’s harder to find wealthy ones because by definition their success is more hidden” (99).

Scattered Thoughts

I was overwhelmingly impressed, as usual, by Thomas Juneau’s summary of the state of the Middle East and its implications for Canada on this Secure Line podcast hosted by Stephanie Carvin, Leah West, and Jessica Davis. Juneau’s ability to distil complex ideas into accessible morsels is as good as anyone’s. He’s also reliably balanced and reasonable.

On National Mobilization

I’m a big fan of the Canadian Armed Forces plan to increase the strength of our supplementary reserve from under 5,000 to 300,000. If successful, it would improve national literacy on security and defence issues; increase this country’s readiness in what is fast becoming a much less secure world; and offer hundreds of thousands of Canadians an attempt to make a real difference to their country in a manner that is likely to foster national pride. All of that said, it seems to me that if Canada really wants to commit to a more serious national security posture then each and every Canadian will ultimately have to be made to feel that they are a part of it. The most efficient and effective way that I can think of to do this is through a dedicated national security / defence tax. I don’t think that the public is ready for this yet, but I find it morally repugnant that we have gotten used to putting members of the Canadian Armed Forces (and, by implication, their families) in harm’s way while demanding tax cuts for ourselves. Surely, if their lives are on the line, the least we can do is contribute through our wallets.

On Crime

I do not understand calls for the elimination of house arrest and parole. If you want criminals to serve longer sentences, then demand longer sentences. Unless we are locking up people for life, it seems absurd to me to release people from prison without also tracking and managing their reintegration into society. If we want safer streets, we need to reduce recidivism. House arrest and parole make it easier to do that.

On the Notwithstanding Clause

I’m a big fan of Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s approach to the use of the notwithstanding clause. Kinew’s basic argument is that Canadian leaders absolutely have the right to invoke Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but that it shouldn’t be easy to override Canadian rights. It follows that leaders should not be able to invoke the clause pre-emptively. Rather, they should have to wait until the courts have declared their legislation unconstitutional. This process would ensure that more Canadians were aware of what they had done and, hopefully, increase the stigma attached to them doing so. Without such rules, it is all but inevitable that a future provincial government will announce that it is invoking the notwithstanding clause preemptively on every piece of legislation that it plans to introduce throughout its term in office. As of right now, there is nothing we could do to stop that.

On the F-35 versus Gripen Debate

I am a regular listener to and fan of Peter Mansbridge’s podcast, The Bridge, which makes me all the more disappointed in this week’s “question of the week.” Mansbridge has asked listeners to weigh in on whether they would rather the Canadian government purchase the (American) F-35 fighter jet or the (Swedish) Gripen. The question presents a false choice. The Canadian government has already purchased 16 F-35s, so the real question is whether one would prefer the F-35 exclusively or a mixed fleet.

It seems to me that if you phrase the question this way, some of the support for the Gripen disappears. Not only is it significantly more expensive to support a mixed fleet, it requires significantly more military personnel. And while I have heard some advocates of a mixed fleet suggest that increasing personnel is a matter of dollars and cents, in this case that simply isn’t true. There are only so many people in this country that want to fly airplanes, let along fighter-jets, and many of them are not interested in joining the Canadian Armed Forces. It seems to me that you don’t pursue a mixed fleet until you already have the personnel in place to support one.

On Building a Pipeline through Northern British Columbia

Since I am not anything near an expert on this one, I am inclined to accept the argument made by some Indigenous leaders that even a single spill off the Northern B.C. coast could be catastrophic. I equally inclined to accept the argument made by some of the engineers that technology has improved sufficiently that with the proper safeguards one can basically guarantee that there won’t be a spill.

But no one seems to be discussing this issue through a national security lens. If a single spill would indeed be catastrophic, the temptation for an adversary to use sabotage to cause a spill and wipe out part of the Canadian economy would be overwhelming. (And I certainly wouldn’t put trying to do so past some of our adversaries.) In this context, it seems critical that we have a national conversation about how we would defend against such sabotage before we make a final decision on building a pipeline through such a fragile region.