Kim Richard Nossal has spent five decades explaining Canadian defence policy to the people who make it. On Wednesday night, the people who make it returned the favour.

The professor emeritus at Queen’s University received the 34th Vimy Award at the CDA Institute’s Vimy Gala, held at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. The sold-out evening of 500 dignitaries drew much of Canada’s defence establishment, including Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan, Defence Minister David McGuinty and Stephen Fuhr, Secretary of State (Defence Procurement).

Also in attendance were Chief Justice of Canada Richard Wagner, Lt.-Gen. Michael Wright, Commander of the Canadian Army, Sen. Rebecca Patterson, MPs Charles Sousa and James Bezan, and Gen. (Ret’d) Tom Lawson, chair of the CDA Institute’s board.

The Vimy Award has traditionally gone to military leaders, diplomats and public servants. Nossal, by his own count, is only the fourth academic to win it.

“My sense is that the Vimy Award tends to focus on those who have actually participated in the formulation and the practice of Canadian defence policy, rather than those who’ve been studying it or conveying an understanding of it to Canadians,” Nossal told Vanguard in an interview.

“It is very much an honour to have one’s contribution recognized, recognizing that writing about and formulating an understanding of Canadian defence policy doesn’t necessarily have the kind of impact that actually doing it does,” he said.

The selection committee saw it differently. Its citation honours “a lifetime devoted to making Canadian defence and foreign policy understood by the very citizens in whose name it is made.”

The record

Nossal taught at McMaster University before moving to Queen’s in 2001, where he directed the Centre for International and Defence Policy. There, he championed the Kingston Conference on International Security and the Visiting Defence Fellowship, forums that put soldiers, officials and academics in the same room.

He also chaired the academic selection committee of the Security and Defence Forum, which helped sustain a national network of defence expertise. His scholarly output includes 12 authored or co-authored books, 13 edited volumes, 68 journal articles and 98 book chapters.

His best-known works include “The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy,” now in its fourth edition and long the standard textbook in the field, and “Charlie Foxtrot,” his account of why Canada struggles to equip its military. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an honorary graduate of the Royal Military College and this year’s recipient of the Mildred A. Schwartz Lifetime Achievement Award.

The citation singles out “Canada Alone,” published just before the current strain in Canada-U.S. relations, which asked how the country should navigate a less reliable American order. “Events have since caught up with his argument,” the committee wrote.

Nossal said he wrote the book in the fall of 2022, and that its core prediction about what a second Trump term, or a Trump-like Republican president, would mean for Canada has held up. What he didn’t foresee was how far the administration would go.

“There was absolutely no way that I ... could have anticipated the bullying, the predatory nature of American foreign policy under his second term,” he said. “I didn’t anticipate where the Trump administration would actually go in terms of the bullying, the predatory nature, the annexationist agenda that he eventually embraced.”

Despite the push for sovereign capability in everything from space launch to munitions, Nossal said Canada will remain tied to its closest ally.

“The reality is that we are going to be very much stuck with the United States into the future on defence,” he said. “The real question is, what kind of broad relationship are we going to be facing with the Americans in the next 10 years or so? That’s something that will only resolve itself once the uncertainty begins to resolve.”

Much of that uncertainty, he said, is about permanence. “We simply will not know how much of Trump’s massive changes will survive him,” Nossal said.

Many of Nossal’s former students now serve in government, in uniform and at universities across the country. The citation credits him with giving them “a sense of belonging in the academic community,” and an undergraduate teaching award at Queen’s now bears his name.

Asked what lesson he hopes they carry into a defence establishment flush with new money, Nossal pointed to history over novelty. He said the historical linkages in Canadian defence policy can still offer guidance, even after the “aberrations” of the last eight to 10 years.

“The kind of realism that those who make Canadian defence policy have always had to bring to the table, I think, is something that needs to constantly be re-emphasized,” he said.