Adam Chapnick's Newsletter - June 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.
It's been an eventful last three months, both for me professionally and in Canadian politics. I ended my term as head of the Department of Defence Studies much earlier than anticipated and am delighted to be returning to the classroom fulltime in the fall. We don't have a replacement for me yet, so I am still performing some of the head of the department duties, but someone will eventually take over and I look forward to supporting their transition.
Publications
Although I have not been writing as much, a couple of older projects came together recently. There is an article in International Journal about Canadian national interests, “Much ado about very little: Canada’s national interests in history and practice,” that I had been thinking about since I began lecturing on the national interest at the Canadian Forces College about 15 years ago. The University of Ottawa Press released Academic Writing for Military Personnel: Revised Edition, a book that I first co-authored with my colleague, Craig Stone, in 2009. Although our book is (at least to me) significantly improved, we revised it before ChatGPT became a big deal. Perhaps one day we'll convince the University of Ottawa Press to allow us to add a new introduction to the revised edition rather than doing another full revamp. The administrative situation at the CFC sapped a lot of the energy I might have otherwise committed to blogging, but I did write a response to an open letter released by the Conference of Defence Associations Institute calling for Ottawa to re-up its commitment to national defence (and security).
In the Media
I've been a bit more active in the media. I spoke to a reporter from the Hill Times about the state of Canadian diplomacy and to Global News about the role of international assistance in Canada’s foreign policy toolkit. I spoke to a reporter from The Daily Mail in anticipation of President Biden’s two-day visit to Canada (and got my analysis completely wrong - I told them not to expect to hear anything about the Safe Third Country Agreement only to learn that revisions to the agreement had been agreed to a year ago - I have to be better about not speculating). I also spoke to the Globe and Mail’s editorial board about defence spending.
Presentations and Speeches in the Community
Thanks to a kind invitation from Professor Laszlo Sarkany, I got to speak to his political science class at Huron University (via Zoom) about Canadian defence policy. It is rare that I speak professionally to anyone under 35 or so and I found the students' questions and reactions to my talk fascinating. I also spoke about Canadian multiculturalism to the Probus Club of Alliston and about Canadian history (via Zoom) to Thornhill Lifelong Learning. The ten-lecture, non-credit course I was teaching at Living and Learning in Retirement - Glendon College "Canadian Politics from the Inside Out (or why our politicians keep making such bizarre decisions)," also ended with a live Zoom session that allowed me to meet some of the people who had been sending questions every week.
Upcoming Talks
Although I have booked a few talks for the fall, I do not have any speaking engagements scheduled over the summer. If you, or your organization, is looking for a speaker, please don't hesitate to reach out.
What I've Been Reading
I really enjoyed How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. (The link provides you with the key-takeaways.) Gardner, a Canadian, is an excellent popular historian who writes a Substack that I subscribe to. His previous books include Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction and Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, both of which do a great job of bridging the gap between the academic and popular realms. I was interested in How Big Things Get Done because I thought it would help me better understand the defence procurement process and, sure enough, the Canadian Coast Guard makes the book as an example of how not to get big things done (splitting up a contract among different bidders on different coasts to satisfy domestic political constituencies is not a great idea if you want to get the most bang for your buck in the least amount of time). I invite my colleagues who study, teach, and work in military procurement yo have a read and let me know what they think.
Scattered Thoughts
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the report of the special raporteur on foreign interference, David Johnston. Like many non-partisans, I am not convinced the a public inquiry will teach us all that much more than we already know (or will have already known if Johnston holds public hearings as he plans to), but I support one anyway. The opposition, with help from a shockingly tone-deaf government, has succeeded in eroding Canadians' trust in the integrity of our public institutions to the point that a significant number of Canadians have made a public inquiry the litmus test of their future confidence. We therefore need a public inquiry to restore Canadians' faith that their government listens to them, not because of what it might or might not reveal about foreign interference.
I see some parallels here with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. To me, that inquiry's most significant purpose was to publicly acknowledge and validate the pain being felt in Indigenous communities across the country and allow the voices of affected peoples to be heard. The communities made it clear that they wanted a national inquiry, but Prime Minister Harper - leading another tone-deaf government - argued that we already knew everything we needed to know (and that the money spent on an inquiry could be better spent on improving services for Indigenous Peoples). Given what happened to the Harper government shortly thereafter, Prime Minister Trudeau had better hope that I have drawn a false parallel.
Two other points: while I am strongly disagree with Pierre Poilievre's refusal to review Johnston's findings personally, what I find most strange about it is that he is therefore choosing not to learn the identities of the four Conservative candidates whom the People's Republic of China had intended to support in the 2019 election. If I had four vulnerable members in my caucus (admittedly, who knows if they are all in caucus), I'd certainly want to know who they were, and I'd want to assure the rest of my party that I was taking their predicament seriously.
Finally, I am not entirely comfortable with the prevailing argument that our national security apparatus is broken. Based on my annual visits to Ottawa to meet with deputy ministers as part of the National Security Programme, I have come to believe that the complexity of the web of organizations involved in national security in Canada (in part the result of a rush to align our apparatus with that of our American colleagues in the early post-9/11 period) makes the system inherently fragile. For it to work, it seems to me that at least three factors must align:
The minister of Public Safety has to be a top notch minister with the ear of the PM (think Ralph Goodale).
The deputy minister of Public Safety has to be a top notch DM, with the gravitas necessary to corral the leaders of the department's 5 partner agencies (each of whom has direct access to the minister, and sometimes the prime minister, on their own) and synthesize their views for the minister. If the DM doesn't understand what every agency is doing, then wires get crossed and the minister is left uninformed. (The best deputy in recent times, in my view, was Malcolm Brown.)
The minister and their deputy have to get along extremely well (as did Goodale and Brown).
If any of these three conditions is missing (a weak minister, a weak or even just junior DM, two good people who don't click), the system functions poorly, and I don't think all three conditions have been there at the same time since Goodale was defeated as an MP and Brown retired. This isn't to say that there haven't been good people in Public Safety, but at least one of the conditions has been lacking for the last 3 or 4 years.
To be fair, it also helps for the prime minister to give the National Security and Intelligence Advisor seriously Clerk-like status (as Stephen Harper did) and for the NSIA and the DM of Public Safety to be on excellent terms. (The record here, to the best of my limited understanding, has been mixed).
Why doesn't the government fix the problem? Here are two possible reasons.
Because Canada has not had a recent 9/11-like experience, Canadians feel relatively safe, especially compared to fellow citizens in like-minded countries. So the public pressure to focus on security just doesn't compare to the pressure to focus on domestic issues. Personally, I could not think of a better national security problem to have (consider the alternatives - a country under constant military bombardment; a rampant wave of public vigilantism; living alongside an aggressive, unfriendly neighbour, or neighbours, etc.), but it's still a problem.
The Trudeau government also has an activist and ambitious agenda and the number of Ralph Goodales and Malcolm Browns available (who also gel professionally) is limited. I suspect that the Liberals thought they could compensate for any weaker links by moving one of their best political operators, Zita Astravas, into Public Safety as a chief of staff to one of the (now two) ministers, but it seems to me that they asked too much of her. If there is another Cabinet shuffle, it will be worth watching not just the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness portfolios, but also any movements among the deputy minister cadre and the more senior political staff.