Patrick Lennox, PhD

I am a Canadian writer, based in Treaty 6 territory, Edmonton, Alberta. I live in the same neighbourhood that Marshall McLuhan was raised in, on the north bank of the North Saskatchewan River. I was born in St. Catharines, and raised in Milton, Oakville and Burlington, Ontario.

I spent my youth in hockey arenas, on baseball diamonds, and running as hard as possible on tarmac, on trails and on the snowpack throughout the winters. As I got older I fell in love with pool halls and pubs, but most of all libraries. I studied politics and literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and international relations and international political economy at the University of Toronto where I earned a Master's degree and PhD under the supervision of Professors Stephen Clarkson and Abraham Rotstein — two of the original Canadian nationalist scholars who were amongst the first to identify the perils of becoming too deeply integrated with the United States.

After UofT, I missed the ocean, so I went back to Dalhousie for a year on a postdoctoral fellowship, where I got to teach a class of my own creation on the political economy of national security, and figure out how to write for an audience wider than my dissertation supervisors.

That year was followed by two more at the University of Calgary's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, also as a postdoctoral fellow. Towards the end of that spell the Canadian Navy called and asked if I wanted to join a major deployment that would take us across the world's oceans to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, where we'd conduct counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations. Like any good Canadian, I'm always up for an adventure, so without the slightest hesitation I accepted the Commodore's offer and before long was bound once again for Halifax to join the crew of the HMCS Iroquois.

While we were at sea the global economy collapsed. I was completely broke anyway so it didn't exactly impact my non-existent retirement savings. But it did put a major freeze on hiring in the Canadian university system where I'd imagined I'd eventually be put to work educating the next generations. Regardless, being part of the crew and participating in the play of international relations on the front lines was a thrill ride I didn't recover from easily. In fact, it had already ruined me for the academy, at least for a while anyway.

By the time I got back to Canadian soil, after sailing through the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean Sea, I had an interview with the Government of Canada's recruitment of policy leaders program. Within a few months I began a new career as a federal public servant overseeing the Harper Government's major investments in Canadian defence and security as an analyst in the International Affairs, Security and Justice Division of the Treasury Board Secretariat.

It was a fascinating introduction to government, but I was still looking to relive that frontline feeling, so I joined the RCMP's federal policing program where I worked in a number of analytical and leadership roles in National Headquarters (2013–2018) and eventually in K Division (Alberta, 2018–2025) where I rode out the pandemic and began to take stock of its extraordinary political and economic aftermath.

In January of 2025 I was in the midst of a truly awful two-week executive training course in the basement of the Leikin Building — the RCMP's national headquarters in Barrhaven, Ontario. I watched Trump's first press conference of his second term from my dingy hotel room out by the Ottawa airport. It hit me in the same way as watching the twin towers fall on my first day of graduate school at the University of Toronto in 2001. I knew the world would be changed dramatically in the coming months and years and I knew my days as a silenced public servant needed to end as soon as possible. I needed my voice back.

In April of 2025, after over 15 years, I quit my job completely to run as the Liberal Candidate in Edmonton Griesbach. It was probably a crazy thing to do, but as I said I'm always up for an adventure and I felt that the 45th general election was the most consequential to this point in Canadian history. I was given a chance to run in that election, and I took it because that's what you do with a chance: you take it and run like hell.

In the months that followed I began a consulting business and took some small steps back into the world of public commentary. By January I'd found my rhythm again and had just started to push out essays on Substack when Carmine Starnino sent me a message asking if he could reprint some of my work for The Walrus. Then Tadzio Richards asked if he could do the same for Alberta Views. And for the last three months I've been writing a book for Dan Wells of the literary press, Biblioasis.

I am a father to three boys, one with severe special needs, the other two with otherworldly talents. I've played at least one game of blitz chess every day online since my friend Doug Morrow taught me how when I was in my early 20s. I'm also a runner, a reader, and a massive fan of music and art. My favourite writers are Haruki Murakami, Denis Johnson, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Tim Winton, Donna Tartt, Craig Davidson, and Patrick DeWitt.