I created this site in 2020 as a place to share ideas and perspectives shaped by a long career in public policy, strategic planning, communications, association management, government, and politics.
When I launched it, I did not fully appreciate how constraining to self-expression it could be to work within Ottawa’s mainstream policy and institutional ecosystem.
Writing carefully, moderating tone and always colouring within the lines may be necessary, even appropriate, but over time it is also limiting. That is why this site did not become the safe place for unvarnished expression I had hoped it would be.
As I write this, I’m in a different place, I’ve left full-time association management and have moved to a different stage of my professional life: One where I can choose who I work with, what projects I lend my time to, and the causes I advocate for.
And with that, I’m reclaiming my own voice — the ability to write and think freely, without the need for perpetual moderation and compromise. This site now reflects that intention more clearly.
I still expect to post the occasional quick take on breaking news, but the emphasis will remain on more considered opinion and longer-form analysis, written honestly and in my own voice.
While the news cycle will shape some of what appears here, my focus will increasingly be on a smaller number of issues of particular concern to me: governance and leadership, mental health and wellbeing in institutional settings, public policy and democratic practice, and the human consequences of how we design and manage our institutions.
And from time to time, I may still share thoughts on a book or two that have little — or nothing at all — to do with public policy.
This site is, at its core, a place to think out loud — freely, honestly, and for me, in a reclaimed voice.
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The industry, Amodei argued, must slow the development of increasingly capable models long enough for safeguards to catch up. Otherwise, AI systems capable of improving themselves could advance beyond our ability to understand or control them.
The predictions may sound extreme. But when the head of the company joins departing employees in calling for a slowdown, the warning can no longer be dismissed as the unease of a few disgruntled staff. It reveals that the people who understand these technologies best increasingly doubt that the industry can control what it is building.
In May 2023, Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, now a Nobel laureate, joined dozens of experts in placing the risk of extinction from AI alongside pandemics and nuclear war.
Three months later, I wrote in the Ottawa Citizen that, despite the warning, governments displayed little sense of urgency.
Since then, AI capabilities have advanced dramatically. The warnings have multiplied. Yet the political response remains familiar: an announcement, a consultation, a few voluntary commitments — and then public attention moves on.
He pointed to privacy legislation, digital-literacy programs, Canadian safety research and international collaboration.
All these initiatives may be worthwhile. But they fail to name the danger being raised: that a company could train or release a system it could no longer control.
Confronted with a warning about losing control of systems more capable than humans, Ottawa responds with data protection, public education and voluntary industry commitments. The threat is existential; the response is peripheral.
This disconnect exposes a troubling blind spot in our democracies.
The tyranny of the present
Our institutions are poorly equipped to confront dangers whose worst consequences lie beyond the next election.
The precautionary principle imposes immediate costs in exchange for future benefits that are difficult to measure. A government that slowed AI development today could lose investment and jobs. A government that prevented a catastrophe might receive credit only in history books.
The benefits of AI are immediate and championed by some of the most powerful corporations in history. Its risks are uncertain and borne largely by people who cannot yet perceive them — or who have not yet been born.
The interests profiting from the race are powerful and highly organized. Those who may bear its consequences are dispersed and often voiceless.
Financial markets have already priced decades of anticipated profits into AI-related companies. Nvidia, the world’s leading supplier of the chips that power AI systems, was valued at approximately US$5.6 trillion at the end of the previous week.
By Monday afternoon, its market value had fallen by more than US$300 billion. Analysts attributed the precipitous decline in Nvidia and other AI stocks largely to the repeated calls by Amodei and other industry leaders to slow the development of the technology.
The market’s reaction illustrates the political trap. A warning intended to protect the public can erase hundreds of billions of dollars in market value almost overnight.
Through index funds, retirement savings and pension plans, millions of people have acquired a financial stake in keeping the race going. Governments therefore face pressure not only from technology companies. They also fear that precautionary regulation could send markets tumbling, erode pension values and — as President Trump has shown — be portrayed as surrendering economic leadership to China.
One crisis feeding another
The dynamic hides a cruel irony. AI is often promoted as a tool for fighting climate change. It could indeed improve electricity grids, climate modelling and industrial efficiency.
Yet the infrastructure required to develop it is becoming not only an enormous consumer of energy and water, but also a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions.
By 2035, data centres could generate 350 million tonnes of emissions annually — nearly 60 per cent of the amount now produced by international aviation. In the United States, data centres directly consumed 66 billion litres of water in 2023. Producing their electricity required nearly 800 billion litres more.
We are exacerbating one existential crisis our institutions are failing to address in order to accelerate a technology whose risks they have not learned to control.
The climate experience should have taught us that uncertainty is not an excuse for inaction when the damage may be irreversible.
Instead, we are repeating the same mistake at much greater speed.
In his latest instalment, largely devoted to the Canada–U.S. trade dispute, he called AI a “crucial issue” and promised to devote a future video to it.
We will be watching. Will he speak only about digital sovereignty, investment and adoption? Or will he finally name the risk identified by the people building the most powerful systems: the real possibility that we could lose control of them?
Naming that danger must come before any credible solution.
Canada’s new national AI strategy promises safety, trustworthy systems and closer alignment with international standards. But its centre remains adoption, investment and economic growth. It aims to increase business adoption of AI from 12 per cent to 60 per cent by 2034 and to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Even the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute illustrates the imbalance. It sits inside the same federal department responsible for promoting the AI industry. It can study emerging risks and evaluate models, but it is not an independent regulator created by Parliament. It has no statutory authority to compel access, impose corrective measures or stop a dangerous system from being released.
Parliament should change that. It should establish an independent AI safety authority in law, with a clear public-interest mandate and institutional independence from the departments promoting the industry. The authority should be entitled to examine advanced models and their testing data, order independent audits, impose corrective measures and suspend the training or deployment of systems that cross established danger thresholds.
Canada cannot solve this problem alone. Nor would simply assigning it to the United Nations create an enforceable system.
Ottawa should begin by working with the countries that control the most advanced chips, computing infrastructure and frontier laboratories. Together, they should establish common danger thresholds, mandatory independent evaluations and reciprocal verification. Access to advanced chips and computing capacity could then be made conditional on compliance.
That coalition could eventually provide the foundation for a broader international agreement. But credible governance must begin with the countries that possess the technical capacity and economic leverage to enforce it.
In 2023, the pioneers of artificial intelligence asked us to take seriously a risk they described as existential. In 2026, engineers are leaving their companies — and industry leaders are calling for a slowdown — because they no longer believe those companies can contain it.
Meanwhile, the machines keep learning. Our political leaders and institutions, not so much.
Mark Carney Owes Howard Lutnick a Debt of Gratitude
The New York Times reported this week that Canada and the United States had agreed on the broad outlines of a trade deal by August 18.
According to the NYT story – the most detailed behind the scenes look to date — Washington would have reduced – but not eliminated – tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum and automobiles while dropping implementation of other tariffs slated to come into effect on August 19.
For its part, Ottawa was prepared to withdraw remaining countertariffs, encourage provinces to restore American alcohol to their shelves, make administrative adjustments to dairy import quotas and even put Keystone XL back on the table.
Chrystia Freeland had already warned about the risks of being too conciliatory with the United States.
The former deputy prime minister, who led Canada’s negotiations of CUSMA during Trump’s first term, warned that accepting permanent U.S. tariffs despite the existence of a continental free-trade agreement would cross a line no previous Canadian government had accepted.
Then Lutnick entered the picture. U.S. demands escalated. Washington sought concessions touching Canada’s freedom to conduct its own trade policy and set its cultural policies, and refused to extend tariff relief to medium- and heavy-duty trucks.
Carney walked away. And he was right to do so.
But the demands that finally killed the deal do not make the agreement Canada was previously prepared to accept any better.
Crossing the Rubicon
Freeland’s warning matters because it goes to the core of Canada’s economic relationship with the United States.
For four decades, Liberal and Conservative governments alike pursued the same broad objective: constrain overwhelming American economic power through enforceable rules while securing progressively freer and more predictable access to the continental market.
The 1989 Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA and CUSMA all moved in that direction.
Based on publicly available information, Carney seemed prepared to move the other way.
The emerging agreement would have established that Canadian goods could remain permanently subject to U.S. tariffs, provided Washington reduced them to levels Ottawa considered tolerable.
The sequencing that seems to have been contemplated at the start of these negotiations makes this even more troubling. After the talks collapsed, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the tariff agreement was supposed to lead to the “announcement of formal negotiations” over CUSMA.
Think about that.
Canada was preparing to enter negotiations over the future of continental free trade after negotiating several major disputes bilaterally, giving up bargaining leverage and accepting a tariff baseline worse than the market access CUSMA was supposed to guarantee.
A Modern-Day Salome
But how did we get to the banks of the Rubicon? After all, Mark Carney was elected in large measure to stand up to an intransigent American president.
Instead of going in the corners elbows up the prime minister spent much of his first year cleaning the ice for the White House.
First much of Canada’s retaliatory tariff regime was removed. Then came the Oval Office meeting where Carney called Trump “a transformative leader”. The Digital Services Tax disappeared. Then Ottawa accommodated Washington on the Gordie Howe International Bridge. And then Keystone XL was put back on the table.
Like a modern-day Salome, since his election, Carney removed one veil after another, convinced that each accommodation brought the elusive deal closer while leaving him in control of the dance.
But concessions change the power relations.
A bargaining chip surrendered today does not reappear tomorrow. And what Washington obtains under threat can quickly become the starting point for its next demand.
After more than a year of this strategy, what exactly has Canada gained?
Back to Square One
Canada now finds itself remarkably close to where Carney started: the Trudeau government’s elbows-up posture and dollar-for-dollar tariff retaliation.
Except Canada returns there after removing some of its countertariffs, making a series of accommodations and signalling its willingness to accept substantial permanent U.S. tariffs.
We are back to square one, but with fewer cards in our hand and considerably more uncertainty about the future of continental trade.
Carney says America has changed and that his government understood the new reality sooner than others.
Perhaps.
But what did that insight buy us?
After more than a year of short-term accommodations aimed at securing a workable relationship with Washington, Canada is once again facing a trade war – with the much more consequential CUSMA negotiations still ahead.
Before the Next Round
Lutnick, like the president he serves, ultimately wanted too much.
His eleventh-hour intervention blew up an agreement Carney appeared ready to present to Canadians as the product of hard-headed realism.
It may also have saved Carney from crossing the Rubicon Freeland had identified.
Carney has explained at length why he ultimately said no.
He now needs to tell Canadians what his government had already said yes to.
This is not about relitigating a failed negotiation. It is about establishing Canada’s starting position for the next one. Concessions made – or signalled – under threat do not disappear when talks collapse.
Washington already knows how far Ottawa was prepared to go.
