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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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?
The Carney government’s new digital safety legislation — the Safe Social Media Act — is a step in the right direction. Ottawa now acknowledges that digital technologies can cause real harm and require public guardrails.
But it would be a mistake to view this week’s announcement as the last word. If anything, it should mark the beginning of a national conversation.
The federal government’s AI Strategy and its online safety legislation reveal a blind spot that must be addressed in the way Canada is approaching this technological revolution.
Over the last three weeks, Ottawa unveiled two relatively coherent digital policy frameworks. The first focuses on AI adoption, productivity, economic competitiveness, skills development, investment and digital sovereignty. The second focuses on risk: child safety, harmful content, exploitation, cyberbullying, problematic online behaviour and platform accountability.
Both matter.
But what remains unanswered — and unacknowledged — is a third question: how will our institutions, communities and democratic culture adapt to a technology capable of fundamentally transforming the flow of information, the exercise of judgment and the very forms of civic participation upon which democratic life depends?
This question is far from theoretical. And it’s one that Ottawa doesn’t seem prepared to entertain.
For more than a decade, social media has transformed the Western public square. Algorithmic polarization, emotional amplification, fragmented narratives and the weakening of shared informational authorities have all contributed to undermining our relationship with a common reality.
Artificial intelligence does not arrive in a vacuum. It enters an ecosystem already shaped by business models that reward outrage, emotional escalation and attention capture.
The danger is not limited to misinformation, disinformation or toxic content. It also lies in the gradual isolation of individuals within increasingly personalized information environments. Ever more sophisticated systems are already learning to anticipate our preferences, validate our biases, flatter our emotions and present us with the content most likely to capture our attention.
A society cannot remain cohesive when its citizens increasingly inhabit isolated and personalized versions of reality.
It is precisely here that Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on artificial intelligence deserves attention.
By dedicating his first major encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to AI — and by releasing it on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the influential text through which Leo XIII confronted the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution — the Pope is sending a clear signal. He views artificial intelligence as something far more consequential than a technological innovation.
The parallel is not accidental.
Rerum Novarum was not primarily about machines. It was about their human, social and political consequences — how a technological revolution was transforming work, communities, institutions and the conditions of collective life itself.
One can reject the Church’s religious foundations outright. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the question the encyclical raises: what becomes of a society when the technologies that structure information, attention and collective judgment increasingly escape civic control?
Where Ottawa primarily sees issues of innovation, adoption, safety and economic competitiveness, the Vatican is asking what AI means for human dignity, social cohesion and the conditions that make collective life possible.
The Carney government deserves credit for beginning to address some of the risks associated with digital technologies.
But the central question is not simply how to make artificial intelligence safer for one demographic or another. It is what kind of common world we can preserve — or build — as these systems become increasingly powerful intermediaries between citizens and their understanding of reality.
If the social media revolution taught us anything, it is this: the most profound consequences of a technology are often the ones we discover too late.
It should be telling — and troubling – for Canadians, that Rome, rather than Ottawa, has chosen to place those broader social questions at the centre of its reflection on artificial intelligence.
