I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what qualities make it more likely that a Canadian defence minister will succeed in their position.

In the classroom, we often discuss whether prior experience in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) matters.

Generally speaking, it does, and it’s not usually helpful.

Given the hierarchical nature of military culture, ministers who were professionally subordinate to the chief of the defence staff as CAF members tend to find the new power dynamic awkward, at best.

Depending on the minister’s reputation in the CAF, gaining the respect of the higher command can also be difficult.

Ministers who have served can be tempted to get drawn into the minutiae of military planning and operations, leading to overworked and resentful staff across the department.

Finally, there is the risk of other ministers around the Cabinet table questioning your loyalty. (Are you representing the government to the military or the military to the government?)

I have typically suggested to my students that the defence minister’s closeness to the prime minister, and by extension their relationships with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office, are what really matters.

Lately, however, I have begun to question this view.

Certainly, a defence minister without the ear of the prime minister is at a tremendous disadvantage, but I’m no longer sure that a good relationship with the Centre is sufficient.

National defence is the Government of Canada's largest category of discretionary spending.

The Department of National Defence (DND) had a budget of about $26.5 billion in 2023. Compare that to the Department of Canadian Heritage, home to five separate ministers. Together, they had a budget of about $2 billion.

That means that if the minister of national defence requests a 10% increase to the DND budget, they are asking for more than the budgets of at least five other ministers, combined.

It seems to me, then, that any contemporary Canadian minister of national defence who can’t build collegial relationships around the Cabinet table doesn’t stand a chance of success.

Fellow Cabinet ministers must be convinced to put DND’s overwhelming requests for funding ahead of their much more limited ones.

The model for a successful minister is the late Bill Graham. When Paul Martin appointed him to Defence, Graham had no prime ministerial aspirations, he understood his file without being too close to it, and he was well-liked and well-respected across the Liberal Party.

As a result, he was able to convince his Cabinet peers to increase defence spending substantially at the expense of all sorts of other departments that were also seeking larger budgets.

Graham’s inclusion as one of the four members of the Ministerial Advisory Panel on Canada's Defence Policy Review in 2016 was no accident.

He was there in part to help Minister Sajjan make the same case that Graham had made over a decade earlier. Again, he was successful.

In this context, even though I thought that Minister Anand did a good job of bringing a level of seriousness and rigour back to DND, I’m not sure that such an ambitious minister would ever have been able to convince the Trudeau Cabinet to provide National Defence with the financial support that it so desperately needs.

Let’s see what Minister Blair can do…

***
Bill Graham’s memoir, The Call of the World, does a good job of explaining his success at National Defence.

If you teach Canadian foreign and/or defence policy, I hope you'll consider using this little debate about Canada's place in the world that Jeremy Wildeman and I just had in Canadian Foreign Policy Journal. I have some free e-copies for those without access to CFPJ. Please let me know if you'd like one.

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On November 29th, I testified before the House of Commons' Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development as part of a panel of witnesses who had been asked to comment on Canada's diplomatic capacity. A video of the proceedings can be found here (beginning at 17:27.30).

The following is the rough text of my opening remarks:

Thank you for the invitation to be here and thank you also for your service to Canadians.

​Standing for election is a noble act, and I salute your courage, your resilience, and your commitment to our country.

You’ve asked me to speak about Canada’s diplomatic capacity. Do we, as a country, have the personnel and supports in place to promote and defend our national interests at home and around the world?

The objective answer to part of this question can be found in statistics that I will leave to folks at Global Affairs Canada to provide.

I will instead reflect on two more subjective capacity issues that I hope you will take into consideration during your deliberations: national ambition on the world stage and the value of diplomatic agility.

The very question of whether Global Affairs Canada has the capacity to “demonstrate leadership within key multilateral organizations” suggests a level of foreign policy ambition that is not necessarily derived from the national interest.

Canada makes up just under 0.5% of the world’s population, and we rely on international trade to grow our economy.

We do not have the capacity – be that in terms of population, independent economic power, or military might – to impose our will on others, and efforts to do so often risk undermining the relationships we must cultivate to maximize our security and prosperity.

We must defend and seek to preserve as much of the current international order as we can while keeping in mind that foreign policy is not an exercise in making Canadians feel good about themselves.

Rather than leading internationally, it is often in our interest to allow others the spotlight instead.
Such a pragmatic approach to defending the national interest requires seasoned, well-educated, multilingual diplomats willing to do the grunt work that keeps the global order functioning.

We must take on the positions in international organizations that no one else wants, participate actively in the meetings that no one enjoys, pay our dues on time and in full no matter who else does, and ensure that states friendly to us remain committed to multilateral solutions to global challenges.

For this, I am confident that the capacity exists. I worry more that it is sometimes diverted to unnecessary efforts to lead.

Similarly, I am less concerned with Canada’s capacity to “plan ahead for future geopolitical shifts, crises, and opportunities” than I am with the ability of our foreign service officials to pivot in response to global disruptions outside of our control.

No amount of planning will prevent more powerful external forces from shaping and reshaping the international environment in which we must operate.

Better then, that we privilege adaptability, flexibility, and relationship-building and that we do so modestly, and with humility.

In sum, let’s focus on the capacity to do the little things right rather than trying too hard to be great.

***
If you are interested in what I think is just about the best piece of communication made available by any member of the Canadian Armed Forces in as long as I can remember, take a look at this video by the Commander of the Navy, Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee.
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Last week, Neil Moss wrote an excellent piece in the Hill Times about a private member’s bill introduced by Bloc Québécois MP Luc Thériault, Bill C-282.

The legislation seeks to prevent our trade officials from making concessions on Canada’s supply management regime in any future international negotiation.

To oversimplify, supply management protects our dairy, eggs, and poultry producers from foreign competition. For a more detailed explanation, see here.

In June, C-282 passed third reading in the House Commons by a vote of 262-51. Among the 51 who voted No were just two Liberals (Chandra Arya and Nathaniel Erskine Smith) and 49 courageous Conservatives. (Pierre Poilievre supported the bill).

It is a shame that much of the limited debate over C-282 focused on whether supply management was worth sustaining.

Both Prime Minister Trudeau and Mr. Poilievre have stated publicly on countless occasions that its future is not at risk under a government led by either of them.

Members of the House of Commons should have debated whether it was in the national interest to handcuff Canadian trade officials in their future dealings.

Legislating even the smallest concession on supply management off-the-table in perpetuity is a gift to our trading partners.

If the bill passes, future negotiations will inevitably begin with opposing negotiators claiming that their willingness to come to the table at all in light of C-282 constitutes a concession. They will then demand a similar concession from Ottawa before formal discussions even start.

In this context, Trade Minister Mary Ng’s support for the bill is, to be generous, baffling.

Surely, even if pressure to support C-282 from the Prime Minister’s Office was intense (supply management is overwhelmingly popular in Quebec), she could have at least absented herself from the House to avoid publicly undercutting members of her own department.

I can’t be sure whether Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly’s decision to pair her vote was a creative attempt to avoid the wrath of the PMO while sending a subtle message of support to Global Affairs Canada employees, but I hope it was.

Fortunately, the bill must pass through the Senate to become law, and some senators, like former diplomat Peter Boehm, have already expressed significant concerns.

Senators who genuinely believe that their chamber exists to offer sober second thought have an incredible and timely opportunity.

They can refuse to pass this flawed private member’s bill and demonstrate to Conservative partisans that, even though 62 of the 91 sitting senators were appointed by the current prime minister, the Upper House is capable of rejecting legislation that has the Liberal caucus’ near-unanimous support for the sake of the national interest.

If senators do not stand up this time, when the case to do so could not be clearer, they will make it that much easier for any future Conservative prime minister to transform the Upper House back into the partisan echo chamber that it used to be.

***
In The Globe and Mail, trade policy expert Lawrence Herman also argues against C-282. His focus is on the economics of supply management.

If you’re interested in Canadian political news, check out The Hill Times. Its small group of young and hungry journalists covers important stories that few others pay attention to.

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Last week, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly spoke to CTV’s Vassy Kapelos about the state of Canadian foreign policy. You can see the interview here.

The minister told Kapelos that she sought to increase Canada’s influence on the world stage:

​“What we’re seeing is that the world’s power structures are moving, and therefore we need to be there to defend our interests without compromising our values, and we need to increase our influence.” 

The minister’s focus on influence is puzzling.

If Canada had more influence in the world today, we wouldn’t have a lot of use for it. With our feminist foreign policy seemingly relegated to the international assistance realm, there is little to distinguish our worldview from that of our more powerful allies.

We aren’t disputing the way that NATO is supporting Ukraine. We don’t disagree with Western efforts to reduce our collective reliance on Chinese imports, especially at the strategic level. We are onside with President Biden’s support for multilateral solutions to global problems. We support and are working towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

When Prime Minister (and minister of external affairs) Robert Borden demanded greater influence into the Empire’s war strategy in 1917, an arrogant British general officer corps was sending tens of thousands of Canadian soldiers to their deaths because of shoddy war-planning.

Borden argued that Canada’s military contribution gave it the right to a say in how the battles were fought.

When Ottawa demanded greater influence on the some of the Second World War’s US-UK Combined Boards in the early 1940s, it was reacting to the tendency of the United States and Great Britain to take Canada’s extensive economic contributions to the Second World War for granted.

Today, our contributions to world affairs are meaningful, but they are not so great as to merit extraordinary influence, regardless of whether there are changes in direction we seek to advocate.

Joly is right to be concerned about the state of Canadian foreign policy, but the problem facing Canada today is not a lack of influence – it’s a lack of relevance.

Experts inside and outside of government have noted the increasing tendency of some of our most significant partners to exclude Ottawa from strategic conversations.

These exclusions are manageable when the West is united, but they might not be under a different American administration.

Fortunately, achieving relevance among our allies is straightforward – you pay for it.

​In 1917, the cost was measured in the lost lives of Canadian soldiers. In the 1940s, Canada’s economic contributions to the war and postwar reconstruction were what counted most. Today, the price seems to be an increase in defence spending.

In this context, it would be prudent for the leadership at Global Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defence to speak with a single voice at the Cabinet table.

​Fellow ministers need to understand that now is not the time to give up our ability to advocate.
 
***
 
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Last week, the House of Commons voted to make Parliament’s hybrid workplace rules permanent.
 
Liberals and New Democrats voted in favour, while most Conservatives and Bloc Québécois members opposed.
 
Proponents claimed that the hybrid format would help MPs maintain a healthier work-life balance.
 
The Bloc’s opposition focused on the strain that the hybrid format placed on Parliamentary interpreters.
 
Conservatives argued that the Liberals had rushed what should have been non-partisan reforms without ensuring the opposition’s support.
 
The Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne made the strongest case I’ve read against the plan based on his concerns about government accountability in a liberal democracy:
 
“No one who has sat in the gallery of the House of Commons, however jaded about politics they may have become, can fail to be moved by the sight of those 338 MPs arrayed below them, from every corner of this absurdly distended country, of all heritages, a civics-class cliché come gloriously to life.
 
That presence has huge symbolic power, not only for the onlookers but the participants. Not only does it project, it solemnifies. It signals something of importance is going on.”
 
No one considered the effect of the reforms on foreign policy.
 
One the most significant takeaways from my book on the differences between the Harper government’s approach to world affairs between 2006-11 and 2011-15 was the impact of minority parliaments on high-level diplomacy.
 
Between 2006 and 2011, Conservative ministers were all but forbidden to travel extensively to ensure that they never missed a vote in the House. 

These restrictions hindered their effectiveness and compromised our national interests.
 
In that context, the Trudeau government might have separated its effort to enshrine hybridity into two bills.
 
The first, which would have likely received all-party support, would have made the Covid-era voting app permanent, allowing MPs to vote on legislation from anywhere in the world.
 
A second bill could have dealt with the rules around participation in Parliamentary debates and committee business.
 
In the latter case, while I don’t disagree with Coyne’s point on symbolism and solemnity, I also sympathize with MPs from Northern British Columbia or the Yukon whose commute to Ottawa can take up to 20 hours.
 
And the pandemic should have taught us all the importance of staying (and/or working from) home when you’re sick.
 
As for Coyne’s argument that hybridity makes it easier for Cabinet ministers to avoid public accountability, recall then-Conservative MP Paul Callandra’s wretched performance during Question Period in 2014.
 
Following direct orders from the Prime Minister’s Office, Callandra – not even a member of Cabinet himself – “responded” to every question posed by the Leader of the Opposition Tom Mulcair about the Harper government’s Iraq policy with the exact same irrelevant criticism of the NDP’s position on Israel.
 
Governments can avoid accountability with or without a hybrid Parliament.
 
So, what can be done?
 
It would be nice to see select Parliamentary sessions held outside of Ottawa. (If the Supreme Court can do it…)
 
I suspect that local MPs would develop greater empathy on issues like work-life balance if they themselves commuted, and making Parliament accessible to Canadians across the country would increase the relevance of the federal government to their lives.
 
Good-faith protocols to govern Cabinet Ministers’ absences from the House while it is sitting would also be helpful.
 
Surely, our foreign minister should be able to attend the occasional Question Period via Zoom if there is a crisis in another part of the world.
 
Nor should our trade minister have to return to Ottawa in the middle of a negotiation when they could appear before a House committee online.
 
In sum, maintaining the voting app was a no-brainer, but the rushed broader decision to make hybrid Parliaments permanent was a missed opportunity for serious reform.
 
***
On anything Parliament-related, it’s always a good idea to check out what Alex Marland and Philippe Lagassé are thinking.
 
***
 
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Last week, the Conference of Defence Associations (CDA) Institute released an open letter, titled “Canada’s National Security and Defence in Peril.”
 
In it, the Institute called on: “Prime Minister Trudeau, his Cabinet and the Government to lead and act with a sense of urgency to heed the recent call of the NATO Secretary General to treat 2% of GDP as a floor rather than a ceiling for defence spending.”
 
(Disclosure: I have been teaching with the president of the Institute for the last two years and signatories to the letter include current and former colleagues, students, and friends.)
 
The letter received plenty of media coverage, and if publicity was the signatories’ intent, then they might declare their effort a success.
 
But if the goal was to effect change in government policy, it seems to me that they could have done much better.
 
I see two inter-related problems.
 
First, while the signatories call for what amounts to an ongoing $15 billion+ increase in defence spending, they don’t explain where they think that huge sum of money should come from.
 
Do they advocate a 2% increase in the GST? The cancellation of Ottawa’s promise to enable all Canadians access to $10-a-day childcare? An increase to the age of eligibility for seniors benefits? More deficit spending?
 
It’s easy to call on governments to spend. But political leadership requires hard choices, and the letter offers no direction to help decision-makers make them.
 
The lack of clear policy direction does, however, enable a diverse list of current and retired senior officials with otherwise divergent views on public policy to line up alongside one another.
 
In doing so, it suggests a degree of consensus among the signatories that is, at best, skin-deep.
 
Would the former Conservative minister of national defence Jason Kenney have signed a letter calling for a GST increase or further deficit spending? Would the former NDP premier of Nova Scotia Darrell Dexter have signed a letter advocating cutbacks to a system of universal childcare?
 
In as much as I agree with the premise of the letter - that increasing spending on defence and security is consistent with the national interest - I would have much preferred to see these experts offer up practical options that Ottawa might consider to promote and preserve national security and Canada’s international reputation.
 
First on my list would be a call to lobby NATO to consider money allocated to refugee resettlement to be part of a member-state’s financial contribution.

Canada’s support for the over 200,000 Ukrainians who have arrived here since the Russian invasion represents a significant benefit to international security. 
 
It certainly does more than the defence dollars that Greece spends on its border dispute with fellow NATO member Turkey.

Next would be some sort of consensus on where future defence and security dollars should come from.

A dedicated revenue stream seems to me to be a simple, stable, and transparent approach, but I suspect that a serious conversation would produce a variety of plausible options. 
 
Given the incredible pedigrees of the signatories to the open letter, the CDA Institute could have at the very least initiated that conversation.
 
But since it hasn’t, I suspect that the letter will be ignored in decision-making circles in Ottawa –  without political consequence.
 
***
If you read one article about Canadian defence policy this week, take a look at Amanda Coletta’s Washington Post piece on what the Discord Leaks reveal about Canada’s declining international reputation among certain allies. In it, she notes that Prime Minister Trudeau has told NATO officials privately that his government has no plans to meet NATO’s 2% of GDP target.
 
***
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I suspect that many readers are following the story that the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and Steven Chase broke last week about how China attempted to shape the outcome of the 2021 federal election.
 
I agree with critics who suggest that the government’s response thus far has been disappointing.
 
More concerning to me, however, is a complementary piece published a few days later by Global News’ Sam Cooper.
 
Cooper’s article begins:
 
“Three weeks before Canada’s 2019 federal election, national security officials allegedly gave an urgent, classified briefing to senior aides from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office, warning them that one of their candidates was part of a Chinese foreign interference network.”
 
Based on my understanding of how the Canadian government works, there is something here that does not quite add up.
 
For the last fifteen years, Canadian governments – Conservative and Liberal – have generally aimed for what is known as a ‘four corners’ approach to managing the politics of our liberal democratic system.
 
(To the best of my understanding, the term ‘four corners’ was coined by a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper.)
 
Think of the four corners like this:

​The two corners on the left side work for the prime minister. The upper left is made up of non-partisan public servants. They represent, for all intents and purposes, the prime minister’s “department.”
 
The lower left are partisan political staff, in this case from the Liberal Party. They work directly for the prime minister on political issues.
 
On the upper right are government departments and agencies. They are also made up of non-partisan public servants, like the people who work at the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) referred to by Cooper.
 
The lower right are, again, Liberal political staff, but these folks work for a minister; in Cooper’s story, Public Safety. (CSIS is one of five partner agencies within the Public Safety portfolio.)
 
The arrows in the diagram indicate who is supposed to speak to whom. Public servants who work in the Privy Council Office (PCO) are meant to speak with their fellow public servants in the various departments, as well as with political officials in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
 
In addition to speaking to the PCO, political staff in the PMO are supposed to speak to political staff in ministers’ offices.
 
Finally, in addition to speaking to the PMO, political staff in a minister’s office are supposed to speak to public servants in the same minister’s department.
 
Public servants in the PCO are not supposed to reach out to political staff in individual departments – they go through the PMO.
 
And, more important, the PMO is not supposed to be in direct contact with departmental officials – they go through the PCO for that.
 
Cooper’s report suggests a meeting between CSIS (i.e., departmental) officials and the PMO. That, in itself, is not unheard of, but still not ideal.
 
What’s more, the report suggests that this meeting was about a Liberal Party issue. And that really confuses me.
 
As public servants, CSIS officials should absolutely be tracking whether our democracy is being compromised, and should report to the government (i.e., through the minister of Public Safety and the PCO) if they have concerns.
 
Whether such interference relates to a specific party shouldn’t matter.
 
Cooper seems to be suggesting that CSIS gave the PMO a private briefing about a Liberal Party issue.
 
If that’s the case, the minister of Public Safety has a lot of explaining to do.
 
For now, however, it seems to me that it is too soon to jump to conclusions. My best guess (hope?) is that CSIS briefed the PCO, not the PMO, and that the focus of the briefing was broader than just the Liberal Party.
 
(It is worth noting that, based on a 2019 Toronto Star report, at around the same time, CSIS was also briefing all of Canada’s major political parties separately about the threat of election interference.)
 
The idea that CSIS briefed the PCO is consistent with former Public Safety Minister Bill Blair’s suggestion that the government has been open about its concerns about China’s efforts to compromise our democracy.
 
If my hunch is correct, we’re back to the still very serious issues that Fife and Chase have raised. But if CSIS really briefed the PMO – rather than the PCO, and/or all of Canada’s major political parties – then the problem could be much bigger.
 
Hopefully, we’ll learn more in the coming days.
 
***
When I have questions about how CSIS works, I ask Carleton University’s Stephanie Carvin.
 
***
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Canada’s former finance minister, Bill Morneau (with help from writer John Lawrence Reynolds), released a new book this month: Where To from Here: A Path to Canadian Prosperity.
 
If you are looking for fulsome – albeit primarily critical – reviews, you can find them here, here, here, and here, along with an interview with Morneau here.
 
Like most of the reviewers, it is hard for me not to find the book disingenuous.
 
Morneau claims to be focused on the need for Canadians, through Ottawa, to make improving productivity their government’s primary objective.
 
It’s a great idea, and he offers – in places – convincing evidence in support of its legitimacy.
 
The problem is that he spends too much of the book slagging his former Cabinet colleagues, and particularly his prime minister, as unserious.
 
It is hard to believe that Morneau could have thought that coverage of his book would focus on anything but the gossipy criticism.
 
Had he really wanted to make a case for a growth-focused agenda – something that we desperately need to hear – he should have looked forward, not backward, and avoided the temptation to settle scores with a prime minister’s office that, admittedly, railroaded him out of politics in a manner that he did not deserve.
 
I am also disappointed with Morneau’s policy solution: a council of advisors modeled on Australia’s Productivity Commission.
 
Canadian Liberal governments have demonstrated repeatedly that they will ignore recommendations from such commissions that don’t please them, while Conservatives typically close such groups down under the guise of shrinking the size of the bureaucracy.
 
Why Morneau thinks his commission would have greater success is unclear.
 
I would have much preferred a simpler recommendation, at least for the current government: stop spending unexpected financial windfalls.
 
The Liberals’ economic rationale for the last eight years has been something along the lines of this: we need to invest in the future, even if we have to go into debt doing so, because the long-term gains from our investments will easily exceed the short-term borrowing costs.
 
As Morneau himself concedes, it is a reasonable argument, at least when the investments aim to promote economic growth and improve productivity.
 
But you’re supposed to use the spoils of your success to pay back the loan. And that’s where the Trudeau government, just like the Dalton McGuinty government from which many of its political staff are drawn, has consistently fallen short. When a government is running deficits, found money should be used to restock the shelves.
 
I am also struggling with two particular criticisms that Morneau levels at Trudeau: first, that by declaring all Cabinet ministers equal in late 2015, he prevented his government from setting clear priorities; second, that the lengthy delay in naming a Cabinet after the 2019 election was a “a huge dereliction of the managerial process.”
 
It seems to me that both actions were all but inevitable given the prime minister’s commitment to a gender-balanced Cabinet.
 
When the Liberals announced their first Cabinet in 2015, five of the fifteen women included were named ministers of state.
 
Although technically full members of the government, ministers of state are paid about $20,000 less than their peers responsible for specific departments.
 
Once the Liberals were called out for the discrepancy, the prime minister swiftly declared all ministers equal and passed the necessary legislation to equalize the pay.

So if you want to criticize anyone here, focus on the transition team for the initial oversight.
 
In 2019, the Liberals had hoped to make star candidate Pascale St-Onge a minister, but the results in her riding were so tight that it took nearly a month for the recount to confirm her victory.
 
In that context, again given the commitment to a gender-balanced Cabinet, it seems to me that the Prime Minister’s Office had no good options:
 
They could have dropped St-Onge, lest she lose the recount.
 
They could have announced a Cabinet that was not gender-balanced, and saved her a spot.
 
They could have appointed a gender-balanced Cabinet, and then added St-Onge and another man to two new portfolios after her win was confirmed (which would have been brutally awkward).
 
Or they could have simply waited, which they did.
 
Morneau complains that the PMO’s silence during this period was unforgivable, but if an amateur like me can figure out what was likely going on, surely a senior Cabinet minister with four years of political experience should have been able to do the same.
 
In sum, Bill Morneau’s ideas about the future of Canada are good ones, but we need someone to deliver them who has fewer grudges to settle and greater political acuity.
 
*** 
Although I don’t agree with some of his analysis, Ian Brodie’s post-politics book/memoir, At the Centre of Government: The Prime Minister and the Limits on Political Power, does a much better job of staying analytical.
 
***
 
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After a series of fits and starts, Canada finally released its Indo-Pacific Strategy last week.
 
One of the best historians of Canada-Asia relations, David Webster, captured the general response to it well:
 
“Canada’s new Indo-Pacific strategy… marks a welcome return of common sense in place of the illusions that have dominated Canada’s approach to Asia for the past quarter-century.
 
At the same time, there are big gaps that show Canadian policymakers still have a lot of thinking to do.”
 
Certainly, some critics are more negative, others are more positive, and still more are waiting for further details and complementary policies, but when the eminently reasonable Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong’s initial response to the strategy is merely to suggest that he needs more time to digest it, it seems clear to me that the document is unlikely to result in any serious grief for the government at home.
 
Personally, I was struck by how explicitly the strategy was framed in terms of national interests.
 
“Interests” are mentioned 17 times across the document; “values” appear just 8 times. There is no touting of Canada’s allegedly “feminist” foreign policy. Instead, appropriate references are made to our more genuinely feminist international assistance policy.
 
In sum, this is a more serious document than some might have anticipated, significantly less focused on branding and marketing than has been typical of this government.
 
I suspect that the reason why is straightforward: the primary goal of the release of Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy was to satisfy a long-standing American concern that Ottawa was not taking the challenge that China poses to a rules-based international order sufficiently seriously.
 
Indeed, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Jolie admitted as much at an event hosted by the Asia Pacific Foundation in October.
 
To quote her directly: “Canada was not always seen as a reliable partner, so that's why we decided to do this Indo-Pacific strategy.”
 
Given the Biden administration’s outspoken preference to work multilaterally, the Trudeau government’s hesitancy to declare its alignment with Washington’s global priorities (initially  because of the detention of the Two Michaels) became all the more problematic.
 
Recall that China was the only country that US Ambassador to Canada David Cohen referred to specifically during his Senate confirmation hearing back in September 2021.
 
Once he arrived in Canada, Cohen told The Globe and Mail that Washington was “looking to Canada to help confront Beijing’s growing military, political and economic ambitions.”
 
“I think for both Canada and the United States, and you could argue for every democracy in the world, China is our greatest threat,” he said.
 
In that context, the strategy’s otherwise unusual promise to “deploy Canada’s first diplomatic position in Hawaii to lead engagement with local U.S. and international partners,” and the pledge to “hold the inaugural Canada–United States Strategic Dialogue on the Indo-Pacific in 2023” make a lot of sense.
 
And the ambassador’s official response, “Today, we welcome Canada’s announcement of its Indo-Pacific Strategy and look forward to continued engagement with Canada, one of the United States’s most important friends and allies, to advance our countries’ shared priorities in the Indo-Pacific region,” must have come as a great relief.
 
All of this is not meant to detract from the work of the staff at Global Affairs Canada, and Canadian Indo-Pacific experts writ large.
 
But it does mean that, inasmuch as Ottawa has promised to shift the focus of its diplomatic, defence, and commercial efforts westward, at its core, the foreign relationship that truly matters to Canadian security and prosperity remains to the south.
 
***
For a clear sense of America’s global priorities, take a look at the speech that National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave upon the release of the latest US National Security Strategy.
 
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Although the majority of my university professor colleagues have lived a hybrid lifestyle for their entire professional lives – on campus for classes and meetings, working at home (or in the field) otherwise – before the pandemic, I went into the office every day.
 
I liked to have a firm division between work and family, and the public transit commute – two subways and two buses – served as a helpful transition for me from “Dad” to “Dr. Chapnick” and back. (Note: the “Dr.” title is a military thing. I have always been Professor Chapnick in civilian institutions.)
 
By 2019, thanks to the combination of a dramatic increase in the size of Toronto’s population and insufficient investment in our public transit system, my commute had become significantly less comfortable – and consequently less productive – but I was still committed to working from the office.
 
The pandemic began to change my perspective. I did not anticipate the overwhelming psychological and physical benefits of replacing the 100+ daily minutes on the TTC with more peaceful time at home.
 
I hadn’t realized how frustrated I had become by the endless subway delays and the overcrowded buses, especially on days when I had to get home in time to drive one of my kids to an after-school activity.
 
In anticipation of a return to full-time, on-site learning during the current academic year, I looked forward to the more human relationships that I’d be able to build with this year’s student cohort, but I wasn’t sure about where I’d be working when I wasn’t teaching.
 
Now that my in-class teaching for the term is coming to an end, it’s time to decide.
 
My tentative plan is to work from the College around four days per week. I’ll commute by public transit three of those days, and drive the fourth.
 
Driving, which I rarely did pre-pandemic, cuts the commute in half, and will help when I have to be home at a specific time.
 
At one level, this compromise is hardly ideal. It’s easier to do longer-form writing from a single location. And that public transit experience is going to get even less comfortable as more people return to work.
 
But there are three compelling reasons for me to continue to commute.
 
The first is – paradoxically – because I am an introvert. More specifically, having my own office is really important to me.
 
The shift to a hybrid work environment is already prompting a re-imagination of how we use our work space, and I suspect that we could eventually have to ask folks who only come into the College a couple of days a week to share offices.
 
The second reason is, paradoxically again, work-life balance.
 
It’s much harder for me to draw a firm line between work and family when I don’t leave the house.
 
Assuming that I’m able to do about 60 minutes of reading over my 100+ minutes of commuting time, staying home during the pandemic should have opened up 40-45 extra minutes to work per day. I typically worked an extra 90.
 
That was fine at first, when the pivot to remote teaching required everyone to bear down, but it was not sustainable.
 
The third reason is that, as incoming department head, I feel a responsibility to be physically available to my junior colleagues.
 
I suspect that the real losers among those of us privileged enough to have had flexible jobs during the pandemic were the new employees.
 
As a close lawyer friend first pointed out to me, its the least experienced among us who benefit the most from the unplanned meetings in the hall, by the printer, or at the water fountain.
 
They can ask questions that they might not feel comfortable putting in an email, or might not feel important enough to justify a Teams call.
 
Does that mean that I think everyone should return to work as often as I will? 

No.
 
If this were five or six years ago, my kids were younger, my commute was longer, or I was not about to begin a term as department head, I would almost certainly try to stay home more.
 
So I do not begrudge those who plan to decrease their time in the office.
 
But I do hope that new scholars – at the Canadian Forces College and elsewhere –  come into work often enough to learn some of the unwritten rules of academic life, and that readers who are in more senior positions consider doing the same to support their junior peers.
 
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Kathryn May has done some great reporting on the future of hybrid work in the Canadian public service which you can fine here and here. If you’d like to read something longer, try Jeffrey Roy’s January 2022 study.
 
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