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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I look forward to the conversation!
America at 250: The Myth That Once United a Nation
America’s 250th birthday ended much as it began: fireworks, patriotic spectacle and renewed appeals to national greatness.
Standing before the National Mall, President Donald Trump invoked the Founding Fathers, military heroes and the language of American exceptionalism before returning to the themes that now define his political vocabulary — personal and political grievance, disputed elections and the story of an America under siege.
The irony was hard to miss.
For someone capable of introspection, the semiquincentennial might have offered something more valuable than another celebration: an opportunity to take stock.
Not because national anniversaries are normally exercises in collective introspection — they rarely are — but because no country has invested more heavily in the idea that its national story carries universal meaning.
American exceptionalism has never been merely a claim about military power, economic strength or technological leadership. At its best, it expressed something far more ambitious: the belief that America was engaged in an ever-unfolding democratic project.
The Constitution itself points to that. Its preamble commits the nation to the ongoing task of forming “a more perfect Union.”
For nearly four centuries, from the Puritan settlers who imagined America as a “city upon a hill” to Ronald Reagan’s revival of that same image during the Cold War, exceptionalism functioned less as a declaration of arrival than as an obligation to become.
It has always been a remarkably productive idea.
It inspired many of the defining achievements of American democracy. It echoes through landmark Supreme Court decisions from Marbury v. Madisonto Brown v. Board of Education. It animated congressional investigations, the publication of the Pentagon Papers and ultimately Watergate and the resignation of a sitting president.
American institutions repeatedly demonstrated a willingness — however imperfect — to expose their own failures to preserve the integrity of the constitutional ideal.
Beyond America’s borders, exceptionalism also helped shape the modern world. The Marshall Plan, the postwar international order, decades of relative geopolitical stability, scientific and medical breakthroughs, and international development efforts that improved the lives of hundreds of millions all reflected a conviction that American power carried responsibilities as well as privileges.
Yet the same idea has always carried a darker impulse.
Manifest Destiny, McCarthyism and military interventions justified in the name of freedom remind us that exceptionalism has also served as a moral licence — an argument that America’s unique role entitled it to behaviour it would never accept from others.
American history, then, is not a contest between exceptionalism and its critics. It is the story of two competing understandings of exceptionalism itself.
One sees America’s ideals as imposing humility, civic responsibility and a constant search for national self-improvement. The other sees those same ideals as proof that America has already arrived.
That tension has defined the American experiment for generations.
For much of its history, the first understanding remained dominant. America was not perfect. It was expected to perpetually strive toward a lofty, if unattainable goal.
Exceptionalism was less an identity than a commitment to universal values.
That is what appears to be changing.
Donald Trump did not create America’s divisions. The Civil War, unresolved racial conflict, Vietnam, religious polarization, economic inequality and regional antagonisms long predate his arrival on the political stage.
His speeches at Mount Rushmore and on the National Mall illustrated the shift. The language of exceptionalism remains everywhere. But it no longer functions as a reminder of the distance between America’s ideals and its reality. Increasingly, it serves to reassure Americans that the journey is already complete.
Believing that the 2026 midterms — or even the 2028 presidential election — will simply reset America to the path imagined by Lincoln mistakes symptom for cause.
America’s fault lines are too deep.
But there is one important difference between this moment and previous American crises.
Earlier periods of conflict unfolded within a civic culture where Americans still largely accepted common institutions, common facts and a shared understanding of public truth. However fierce the disagreements, there remained enough common ground for the country to correct itself.
When facts themselves become matters of partisan allegiance and reality fragments, democracy loses one of its most important corrective mechanisms.
It is no longer just the story of American exceptionalism that is weakening.
The conditions that once made that narrative the connective tissue of a fragmented nation are weakening as well.
The greatest achievement of American exceptionalism was never its ability to persuade Americans that they belonged to an exceptional nation. Its greatest achievement lay in persuading them that they had a continuing obligation to become one.
That ambition now appears increasingly uncertain.
America’s retreat from international leadership, growing inwardness and the replacement of civic obligation with identity affirmation all point toward a deeper historical rupture.
American exceptionalism was never at its zenith when it proclaimed certainty. It was at its best when it demanded that America continue the difficult journey toward becoming what it had always claimed to be.
The real turning point — for America and for the democratic world — is not Donald Trump’s presidency. It will come if America truly ceases to understand itself as an unfinished national project.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, essayist Milan Kundera described a condition in which choices become detached from the weight of their consequences. The longer we observe Mark Carney’s political journey, the more that image comes to mind.
This week, the Prime Minister said he was “very pleased” with the framework agreement reached between the United States and Iran. He described it as a “game changer.” Asked on CNN whether the war had been worth it, he answered in the affirmative.
The issue is not that Carney welcomes a de-escalation. The issue is that before concluding a war was worth fighting, one should first ask whether it was necessary.
The agreement celebrated at the G7 is neither a peace treaty nor a definitive resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue. By all accounts, it is a framework that suspends hostilities, reopens the Strait of Hormuz and sends the hardest questions — inspections, enrichment, sanctions and regional security — into another round of negotiations.
In other words, after months of war, thousands of deaths and a global economic shock, the parties have returned to the negotiating table.
The problem is that the table already existed.
When the first American and Israeli strikes were launched in late February, negotiations were underway through Omani mediation. They were fragile, certainly. Success was far from guaranteed. But talks were taking place, progress had reportedly been made and further meetings were scheduled.
The question is not whether diplomacy would have succeeded. The question is why diplomacy was abandoned before it had failed.
The Prime Minister consistently returns to the same argument: the world is changing rapidly, circumstances evolve and leaders must adapt.
The vision is coherent. But it raises an increasingly difficult question.
What exactly are the values Carney believes should guide political action?
Values matter only if they impose constraints. They matter only if they continue to shape decisions when circumstances become difficult. Otherwise, they are little more than window dressing.
In the case of Iran, those constraints are remarkably difficult to identify.
If diplomacy is a guiding principle, why endorse military action while negotiations are still underway? If international law and multilateralism are meant to constrain the use of force, how does one celebrate a war that effectively bypassed the United Nations process?
Perhaps there are good answers to those questions. But we have yet to hear them.
What stands out about Carney is not contradiction so much as fluidity. The reference points shift constantly. The criteria for evaluation shift with them. The narrative evolves.
This is not necessarily bad faith. It is something more subtle: a certain lightness of being.
Under Carney, events seem to detach themselves remarkably quickly from their consequences. One position gives way to another. One crisis replaces the last. Attention moves on.
Yet speeches at Davos, Dublin or the G7 are not merely communications exercises. They claim to explain the world, guide public policy and shape collective choices.
Their value depends on their ability to withstand the test of events.
When they are never measured against the consequences that follow, they risk becoming nothing more than convenient interpretations of unfolding events.
For Canadians, that may be the lesson to draw from the Iran episode.
If a leader can endorse a war and then celebrate the agreement that follows it without ever being required to account seriously for the war’s necessity, its consequences or its relationship to the principles he invokes, what value should we attach to that endorsement?
And more importantly, what value should we place on his words?
