September 8, 2025

Adam Chapnick's Newsletter - September 2025

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.

Classes started back up at the Canadian Forces College (CFC) in mid-August, which means that I have been focused on pre-recording lectures and then teaching classes for the last number of weeks. This is the first time I’ve taught Canadian strategic decision-making in the second Trump era, and the experience has been fascinating.

On the research front, I submitted an essay to International Journal about the history of the journal itself that is currently under review and Vincent Rigby and I have received two of the three peer reviews of our history of the Office of the National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister. The two reviews have been positive and constructive, and if the third is similar, we should be able to get our paper into the publication process by the end of the month. We are pleased to be working with the Centre for International Governance Innovation on this, an organization with whom both of us have worked before.

In terms of professional development, on the recommendation of Michelle Miller’s R3 Newsletter, I completed Coursera’s AI in Education: Leveraging ChatGPT for Teaching. As someone who embraces change with a great deal of caution, I found the course really useful. I also like this new teaching with AI resource by Ashley Evans.

Publications

Since my last newsletter, I released a blog about the Carney government’s significant increase to military pay and benefits. I support what the government has done, but worry about the divisions that could be felt across the public service given how much of the rest of Ottawa is facing significant cuts and potential job losses.

In the Media

I tend to be in the media more in the summer (I think) because there are fewer folks available to provide commentary. I spoke to the Toronto Star about Canadian attitudes towards the United States, with CHCH television about Canada’s hosting of the annual G-7 meeting in Kananaskis, with The Hill Times about the state of Canada’s foreign service, with Bloomberg about the 80^th anniversary of the United Nations Charter and, separately, about UN reform. I was interviewed by a reporter from The China Daily about Canada-US trade negotiations, by the Canadian Press about Canadian attitudes toward Israel and the future of the Ottawa Treaty on anti-personnel landmines. Finally, as part of the work that Asa McKercher and I have done promoting our new book, we were part of a discussion of Canadian foreign policy on the Rebuilding Canada’s Influence podcast.

Presentations and Speeches in the Community

The summer is usually slower on the Greater Toronto Area speaking circuit, but I did speak to Credit River Probus Club about managing Canada-US relations.

Upcoming Talks

I’ll be in Ottawa next week speaking to members of the Canadian Armed Forces about how Ottawa has typically convinced, or failed to convince, Canadians to take national security and defence more seriously in times of global crisis. In October, I’ll be in Orillia speaking to members of Third Age Learning Lakehead about Canada and its place in the world. In November, I’ll join the Westway Probus Club to talk about Canadian history and with a group of executives studying at Dublin City University for a discussion about managing Canada-US relations. 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

On Politics

Although I didn’t agree with all of it, I did learn a lot from reading Andrew Coyne’s new book The Crisis of Canadian Democracy. Coyne has me sold on mandatory voting and, while I prefer our first past the post system of elections to proportional representation, if we ever were to switch systems, Coyne’s proposed version is significantly better than the proposals that are typically on offer.

On Teaching

Here is a really convincing argument for vocabulary quizzes in courses that require reading and comprehension skills. Elsewhere, Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain is a good book if you are unfamiliar with recent research on teaching and learning but didn’t add that much to my understanding personally. On the other hand, David Yeager’s 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People was incredible. It’s well worth understanding the enforcer, protector, and mentor mindsets that he discusses and his argument that young people are much more rational than we normally make them out to be (we just don’t always understand their motivation) is convincing. Finally, as strange as it sounds, the course about US tax policy discussed here is a brilliant way to teach undergraduates about citizenship. I hope that there are profs in Canada who might run with this idea.

Scattered Thoughts

I was really impressed by Valérie Pisano in this Public Policy Forum (Wonk) podcast about how unprepared we are for agentic AI.

On Buying Canadian

I am growing increasingly concerned with calls to ‘buy Canadian.’ I absolutely agree with the idea of not buying American right now, given the illegal and unfair tariffs that we are facing. But if every country only buys from itself, Canadians will suffer deeply. Our economy is much more reliant on foreign trade than most. We represent just 0.5% of the world’s population and we want and need our businesses to sell outside of the country. It will be really hard to convince others to buy our goods and services if we refuse to buy theirs. So by all means support Canadian businesses, but let’s limit deliberate efforts to punish other countries to the ones that are punishing us. Free and fair international trade remains consistent with Canada’s national interests and it’s hard to advocate something if your policies undermine it.

On Putting our Elbows Up and Down

On the other hand, I think that criticism of the Carney government for putting its elbows down misses the mark. When the United States first imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, it seems to me that our government (led at the time by Justin Trudeau) made two assumptions that ended up being flawed. (The first of which was an understandable error, the second was an own-goal.) Ottawa assumed, rightly, that if every country stood up to the US at once, President Trump would eventually be forced to back down. The problem with that assumption was that it only worked if everyone reacted together, and they didn’t.

Ottawa also seemed to assume, very wrongly, that if countries were initially reluctant to stand up to Washington, it could use its influence to build a coalition of countries that would join together to fight the tariffs. Over the last 20 years, the Harper and Trudeau governments have left Canada with virtually no (good) friends. The Harper government cut defence to the bone, stopped participating in certain NATO exercises, boycotted Commonwealth meetings, and hectored Africa (for good reason, but the approach was still poor). The Trudeau government promised the UN the world, and didn’t deliver. For a while it seemed to take actually pride in not meeting its NATO obligations. And it lectured just about everyone.

I suspect that Prime Minister Carney was at least somewhat surprised to learn that, apart from perhaps Ukraine, there doesn’t seem to be a single country that feels like it owes Canada anything right now. He is therefore rightly spending an overwhelming amount of time trying to rebuild old friendships and amass diplomatic capital. I sincerely hope that he succeeds, but it will be hard to do worse than his recent predecessors.

In this context, Ottawa cannot keep its elbows up: alone against the United States it is no match. That is not to say, however, that individual Canadians should not keep their elbows up as high as they can. We should avoid the United States on vacation; we should check the labels on clothes and food and not reward the United States for its tariffs. Our government is vulnerable, but it is more difficult (although certainly not impossible) for the American administration to punish Canada for the actions of individual Canadians.

On Government Bureaucracy

For my historian and journalism friends, I think I have figured out how to submit a successful access to information request. Submit your request and wait patiently for a response. That response will inevitably include a delay of months or years. When you receive said response, make a note in your calendar of the new due date. (This is important, because it could be 12-24 months away.) A few days before that due date, research the complaints process for the government’s failure to meet its own deadline. Be sure not to do this any earlier than a few days before because the policy is likely to have changed since you submitted your original request. The day after the government has officially failed to meet its deadline, launch an official complaint. Make sure to follow the complaints process to the letter. (Right now, that means you need copies of all of your previous correspondence, etc.) If you file that complaint properly, you should get your request fulfilled within another 6-8 weeks.

This is, as you can see, absolutely pathetic. Carney government, please do better.