Adam Chapnick's Newsletter - June 2022
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.
In the Media
Although I try to limit my media engagements these days to enable a more diverse array of commentators to contribute to the national discourse, since my last newsletter, I did speak to a reporter from the Hill Times about the UN’s role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and, in light of a blog post (that you'll find cited below), I spoke with AM640 Radio’s On Point about Canadian defence spending, and with a reporter from the Globe and Mail about defence and the 2022 federal budget.
Blog
I have continued to blog more regularly than I had anticipated. Since my last newsletter, I have written about:
the problem with trying to link the climate change debate to support for Ukraine;
why we should spend less time focusing on dedicating 2% of Canadian GDP to defence;
the plea deal of the former chief of the defence staff, Jonathan Vance;
why I am disappointed by Ottawa's re-embrace of temporary foreign workers;
my (rather unorthodox) concerns about any political party emphasizing balanced budgets;
Publications
After a tremendous amount of effort from a collection of outstanding authors, I was delighted when the Centre for International Governance Innovation released a new digital essay series in April, Situating Canada in a Changing World: Constructing a Modern and Prosperous Future. I co-edited the series with CIGI's Aaron Shull, and I'm quite excited about the outcome. We paired historians with public policy practitioners to examine six contemporary Canadian challenges from both historical and contemporary perspectives. The historians wrote contextual essays; the practitioners responded to them. The series honours the late diplomat John Wendell Holmes, who was known for his use of history as an analytical lens to explain and help others understand present day government policy. I hope that this effort encourages further collaborations between Canada's community of professional historians and the political world. The series is currently being translated, and will eventually also be available in French.
Presentations and Speeches in the Community
Over the last three months, I spoke to Lifelong Learning - Markham about the United Nations and I spoke about major events in Canadian history as part of the Richmond Hill Public Library History Lecture Series.
Upcoming Talks
I'll be re-visiting the Canadian history lecture with the members of the East York Probus Club in a couple of weeks and have two more lectures in the Greater Toronto Area scheduled for the fall. If you're interested in having me speak, please contact me through my website.
What I'm Reading
I try to read at least a book or two a year about teaching and learning, and managed to find some time to do so in March. Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers provides an excellent, accessible summary of the contemporary literature. The author, Jessamyn Neuhaus, writes with wit and grace. I also read Jay R. Howard's Discussion in the College Classroom: Getting your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online. It's a bit heavier, but the research underpinning it is impressive. Among the more traditional material I've been reading are a couple of articles by Tim Gravelle about foreign policy attitudes in Canada and elsewhere. (For a list of Tim's publications, see here.) Gravelle works with survey data, and I don't have the training to understand everything that he writes, but his insights into popular attitudes towards international affairs are important, and worth tracking if you study Canadian external relations for a living.
Other Thoughts
The textbook I've been working on is much closer to the end now. The cases are all done, and we're two chapters and a bit away from submitting a draft manuscript to our editor. It will be quite the relief when that happens. If you teach Canadian foreign policy (as history, political science, or Canadian Studies) and would like to test drive some of our cases in your classes next year, don't hesitate to reach out. Your feedback would be welcome.
Finally, I'm finishing off this newsletter in the aftermath of what I saw as a rather disappointing Ontario provincial election. I found none of the major parties to be inspiring, nor were most of their proposed solutions all that serious. I'm certainly not a professional strategist, but I can't help but wonder whether the Liberal Party in particular made a serious mistake with their platform. It seems to me that, since neither the Progressive Conservatives nor the NDP demonstrated any sort of commitment to fiscal responsibility, there was an opportunity for the Liberals to differentiate themselves by proposing significantly more moderate spending than their opponents and reinventing themselves as the party of fiscal moderation and social progressivism. I can't imagine how the Progressive Conservatives would have dealt with a party to the left of them that was objectively more fiscally responsible, and there would have been no mistaking the Liberals for the NDP. Instead, all three of the leading parties proposed to borrow money from the next generation to satisfy the wants and needs of their preferred segments of today's voters. They catered to our worst and most selfish impulses, and we did little to stop them. Here's hoping that at least one of them (but, better, all of them) rethinks their approach over the next 4 years. For now, at least the Green's Mike Schreiner seems like a decent person who has gotten into politics for the right reasons.