Adam Chapnick's Newsletter - June 2025
These last three months have offered me an incredible opportunity to speak about the future of Canadian foreign policy to a variety of organizations and media outlets. The genuine interest among Canadians in our place in the world has been inspiring. If there is any good to come out of the global chaos that has been unleashed upon us, an improvement in the national spirit has to be part of it.
Recent changes to the state of Canadian politics have caused me to to revisit virtually all of my lecture notes, which has left me behind in preparing for the upcoming academic year, but that is a fair price to pay for the opportunity to teach material that is immediately relevant to my students' professional lives and careers.
On the research front, it looks like Vincent Rigby and I have found a place to publish our history of the Office of the National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister, but I will hold off on a more formal announcement until the details are confirmed.
Publications
Although I spent most of the last three months travelling and speaking across the country, I did manage to write two short essays and one blog post. “Trump Threats: Is foreign policy the biggest election issue for Canadian voters this election?” was published by The Conversation and then republished as “Les menaces de Trump seront-elles le principal enjeu de l’élection au Canada ?” in La Conversation. It drew extensively from my longer report, “Foreign Policy in Canadian Elections: A review,” that was published as part of the Mulroney Papers in Public Policy and Governance Review Essay series last December.
Last week, I contributed to The Hill Times’ special defence policy issue with a paper called “How to preserve NORAD? All action, and absolutely no talk.” It’s behind a paywall, but if you’d like to read it, please reach out. Finally, I reactivated my blog to discuss Canadian foreign policy towards Israel from a personal point of view.
In the Media
The interest that Canadians have been showing in foreign poicy (and that the world has been showing in Canadian politics) is evident in the volume of my recent media engagements. I spoke to reporters from El Confidencial (Spain), the China Daily (twice), Newsweek, NKH World (Japan), the Washington Examiner, and ABC News Digital about the state of Canada-US relations. I spoke to The Hill Times about Canada’s plans to host the next G7 summit and about the lack of support G7 foreign ministers offered Canada at their meeting in Charlevoix. I spoke to CJOB Winnipeg, CBC Manitoba, Rogers’ Manitoba Connections, CBC Radio Thunder Bay, and the Prince George Citizen about my book on the history of Canadian foreign policy. I discussed the place of foreign policy in the recent federal election and the future of Canadian foreign policy more generally on The Agenda with Steve Paikin and election politics and the speech from the throne with France 24 television. I spoke about the operationalization of Canadian defence and security policy on The Northern Sentinels podcast. And I spoke about the history of Canadian foreign policy on the Books in Five podcast.
Presentations and Speeches in the Community
Thanks in large part to the organizational prowess of Chris Kilford, and with the great help of a number of other branch executives from across the country, I embarked on an 11-city book tour of Canadian International Council branches. (For the book, see here. You can get the e-book here.) The tour brought me to Saskatoon, North Bay, Thunder Bay, Whitehorse, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Parksville, Victoria, Prince George, Kitchener, and Hamilton. I gave similar foreign policy talks to the Sheridan Probus Club and as part of the Wasaga Beach Library Speaker Series. I spoke (via Zoom) to the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies Vancouver about Canada’s future. I spoke to Third Age Learning, York Region and the Esso Annuitant Club of Toronto North about Canada-US relations. And I presented a paper, “Managing Canada-US Relations in the Second Trump Era,” at the Royal Canadian Military Institute’s Defence and Security Studies Annual Conference.
Upcoming Talks
The summer tends to be slower on the speaking circuit, but I will be discussing the Canada-US relationship with members of the Credit River Probus Club later this month. 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
I spent what little spare time I had these last few months working my way through Dan Levy and Angela Perez Albertos’ Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT. It has become much too clear to me that it will be all but impossible to promote student learning in the future without a grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of AI, and this book did an outstanding job of explaining what instructors are and will be facing. I recognize that I still need to learn much more, and I plan to use AI as a French tutor going forward in the hope that regular engagement will make me more comfortable experimenting.
I am also thinking through how to explain the importance of being able to produce clear prose to future students who are likely to argue back that AI can take care of that for them. The point, it seems to me, is that writing all but compels us to slow down and think more deeply. The analogy that comes to mind draws from competitive exercise. Folks training for marathons often cycle as a form of cross-training. They will not use their cycling skills when they race, but cycling allows them to improve their general fitness without placing undue stress on their bodies as they recover from their last run. The ability to write clearly matters even if AI can do it for you because the process of writing increases your mental fitness and resilience without burning you out. So, in the case of my students, when you get back to your real job, your mind will be sharper. I will trial this explanation with next year’s Canadian Forces College cohort and see how it goes.
As for AI as an aid in designing university-level courses, after reading Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT, it seems to me that AI would be a great help in planning a course that I knew little to nothing about, but that it isn’t nearly as helpful teaching professionals in a graduate school.
Scattered Thoughts
On the Canadian election
Jagmeet Singh’s vilification of “the ultra-rich” during the last election would not have been tolerated if he had targeted any other group in our society. We elect governments to govern for all of us; belittling any segment of Canadian society is not a look that works for me.
Bruce Fanjoy’s success in Ottawa-Carleton suggests to me that political parties should begin identifying and nominating candidates for the next election now, and that door-knocking should be an ongoing activity even if you aren’t the sitting Member of Parliament for your constituency. Not only does it improve your chances of getting elected, it should also enable all of our current and future elected officials to maintain a consistent sense of how people are feeling across the country.
If our electoral system was based solely on proportional representation (assuming a modest threshold to be seated in to the House of Commons), the Green Party would not be represented in Parliament today.
On our new government
It turns out that the (long) time it took Justin Trudeau to resign might end up serving our interests. Because Trudeau stayed on until well after Donald Trump retook the White House, he made himself into the sort of scapegoat we might need to eventually move past the current bilateral trade dispute. If and when this all ends, the Trump Administration should be able to save face by blaming Trudeau for everything. Had we had an election three, six, or even nine months earlier, such face-saving would have been more difficult.
Prime Minister Carney’s list of Cabinet committees is out. I was pleased to learn that he has restored and will chair the Committee on National Security. I was surprised that all nine of his committee chairs (as well as his chief of staff and principal secretary) are men.
On the lackluster Democratic response to President Trump
I don’t think that anyone (in the Western world) has figured out how to respond to the Trump administration’s “flood the zone” governance strategy. Until someone does, we should expect populist governments (if not all governing parties) to make extensive use of it: Announce so many policies at the same time that your opponent doesn’t know what to take on first, and watch as some of your most outrageous proposals pass virtually untouched. I am confident that someone will figure out a way to combat this approach, but I don’t see any evidence of how yet.
On Canadian government bureaucracy
It costs about $60 to take an airport taxi from my home to Pearson International Airport. If I am using government funds for the trip, I am allowed to tip up to 15%, so $9. I had a deal from Uber last month that offered me a ride to the airport for $36. I wanted to tip the driver the same $9 (it seems to me that the driver shouldn’t be punished because I got a deal), so the total cost of the trip would have been $45 (instead of $69). If I take the Uber and tip $9, I have to pay the government back $3.60. (Since 15% of $36 is $5.40, if I tip more than that it must come from me directly.) Put differently, I have to pay $3.60 out of pocket to save the country $24. These rules are in place so that I don’t pretend that my friend is an Uber, have them drive me to the airport, and then tip them an extraordinary amount of money, all on the government’s dime.
Rules like this assume that I will cheat the government if I can. They privilege transparency over everything else (including getting the biggest bang for the government’s buck). If we want our government to be more efficient, we have to assume that our public service is made up of honest people. We can choose greater accountability or greater efficiency. They exist on a spectrum, so we can’t have both. Personally, I’d much rather accept that the occasional person will try to game the system (we can catch some of them by audits) so that it’s easier for me to save the government money. Too many Canadians (and Canadian politicians) seem to disagree. They are so obsessed with tracking every dollar that the public service spends that they make it that much harder to do the right thing.