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 news last week that Canada and the US had reached a deal that would open the bridge to cross border traffic dripped in irony. A bridge named after the hockey legend whose elbows inspired Canada’s rallying cry against Donald Trump opening only after Ottawa accommodated Washington’s bully tactics.
But the agreement is also a window into how Mark Carney governs.
Trump blocked a completed bridge that Canada financed even if Ottawa had every factual, legal and moral argument on its side. And it was Washington that went into the corners with its elbows up and Canada that turtled.
The bridge is now scheduled to open on July 27. According to media reports, the settlement gives Washington new influence over significant toll decisions while directing half of the bridge’s future net profits to a 15-year regional economic development fund.
Under the original arrangement, Canada expected to recover its investment through toll revenues before Michigan shared in the profits. The new agreement pushes that recovery much farther into the future, although Ottawa has yet to disclose by how much.
That matters because time is the hidden currency of politics.
Carney has shown that he thinks like an economist and governs like a central banker.
That does not make him apolitical. Quite the opposite. He is deeply political — his approval ratings are evidence of this. But he approaches politics as a continuing exercise in trade-offs, optimization and risk management where the future is discounted and the immediate objective is the priority.
Central bankers operate much the same way. They calm markets, restore confidence, contain shocks and prevent today’s instability from becoming tomorrow’s panic.
But a country is not a balance sheet. Sovereignty, credibility and strategic leverage cannot always be assigned a present value and traded for short-term stability.
Observing Mark Carney increasingly suggests that he treats red lines not as principles to defend, but as obstacles to clear.
Consider the Digital Services Tax. Trump halted trade negotiations. Ottawa quickly rescinded a policy years in the making to restart them. The government openly described the reversal as the price of advancing broader negotiations with Washington.
Last week, Carney became the first Canadian prime minister in 26 years to visit Saudi Arabia, reversing a long period of political distance from a regime whose human rights record remains appalling. His explanation had the polished efficiency of a central bank communiqué: “Engagement is not endorsement.” Lecturing governments from afar, he added, is ineffective.
Each decision can be defended on its own merits. Taken together, Carney’s governing doctrine appears to be this: Address today’s problem; leave the consequences to tomorrow.
Carney often says Canada must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Every concession changes the world as it is. Reward coercion today and coercion becomes more likely tomorrow. Treat every red line as provisional and adversaries learn that Canadian resistance has a price, and enough pressure will reveal it.
That may be the lasting significance of the Gordie Howe bridge agreement.
“Elbows Up” promised that Canada would absorb short-term pain to protect its long-term independence. Carney appears ready to reverse that bargain.
He secures immediate relief by transferring the cost, the precedent and the lost leverage into the future.
The bridge will open. Traffic will move.
The government will declare the crisis resolved and celebrate Canada-U.S. trade.
But a bridge can carry more than vehicles. This one carries a warning.
Mark Carney governs as though the future can always absorb one more political compromise.
Keynes may have been right, after all, in the long run, we will indeed all be dead. But that will be cold comfort for future generations.
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.
