The World in Canada

The government of Canada’s International Policy Statement, released in mid April, spells out a proactive and ambitious foreign policy. Its main goal, as the statement’s subtitle says, is to build for Canada “a role of pride and influence in the world.” It represents the most ambitious vision in a generation for promoting Canadian values and interests—on this continent with the United States and, independently, across the globe. In the four areas of foreign policy it enumerates—diplomacy, defence, development and commerce— the government proposes to aim higher and spend more.

But spending more without a strategic vision will not succeed in spurring Canada to achieve its full potential. There is a glimpse of one such vision in the document, although it is left underdeveloped. A key recurring theme in the statement is that “the world is changing, quickly and radically, and these changes matter to Canada … We are in the midst of a major rebalancing of global power.” In a world of existing and emerging giants and continental integration, countries with small populations run the risk of being relegated to the margins of global governance and commerce—and thus “we will have to be smart, focused, agile, creative and dogged in the pursuit of our interests.” The predominant theme of our time is the opportunities and challenges of globalization, and the corresponding mobility of people, ideas and capital, and here, implies the statement, the Canada of the early 21st century has a distinct comparative advantage.

Under the heading of “The Canadian Approach,” the statement says:

A passage such as this indicates that the government sees the uniqueness of Canada’s diversity and its multiculturalism as a major advantage in a globalized and rapidly changing world, and that it has an interest in seeing the place of “Canada in the world” through the lens of “the world in Canada.” Among the statement’s prescriptions, a key government initiative is listed: to “support the efforts of Canadian diasporas to forge transnational political, economic and cultural links” with their countries of origin and beyond. This is a bold and innovative initiative, the fruits of which could enhance Canada’s global reach and influence in significant ways.

It is thus important to develop a specific, high-resolution picture of how Canada’s diasporas can act as cultural, business and development bridges between their countries of origin and their new home. Conventional thinking in these areas up to now has seen immigration and multiculturalism as affecting only the conditions and domestic policies of Canada. Given the critical mass of research that now exists on this topic, we must begin to see diversity and multiculturalism as matters affecting, even transforming, Canada’s foreign policy as well.

Multiculturalism as Foreign Policy

To grasp the place of multiculturalism in Canada’s foreign policy, the concept’s history bears revisiting. The seeds of Canada’s current achievements were sown in the 1960s and early 1970s by the successive Liberal governments of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, who also charted, for the first time, a unique and independent foreign policy for Canada. During the five years of the Pearson government, from 1963 to 1968, Parliament achieved formative, nation-defining breakthroughs by instituting the Maple Leaf as Canada’s flag, the Canada Pension Plan and publicly funded and universal medical care, which was later enshrined in the Canada Health Act, as well as student loans to make higher education more accessible. These achievements coincided with the adoption of bilingualism and non-discriminatory and “colour-blind” immigration policies. The birth of this new Canada, personifying what Trudeau conceived as the “Just Society,” was thus inseparable from the recognition of the cultural rights and freedoms of all Canadians. An accepting attitude toward newcomers and diversity has been woven into the country’s national self-definition for more than three decades.

There cannot be one cultural policy for Canadians of British and French origin, another for the original peoples and yet a third for all others. For although there are two official languages, there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other. No citizen or group of citizens is other than Canadian, and all should be treated fairly.

The policy of multiculturalism, announced by Trudeau in 1971, grew out of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which Pearson’s government had spawned in 1963. The official recognition embodied in the royal commission—that French-speaking Canadians were full and equal linguistic partners with English-speaking Canadians, recognition that was enshrined in the Official Languages Act of 1969— created the political and cultural space for the Canadian government and the country as a whole to extend a similar privilege to all Canadians. In a historic speech to the House of Commons on October 8, 1971, Trudeau declared:

These achievements, in many ways unique to Canada, provide the ideal launch pad for the current generation of Canadians and their leaders. In a world that is in dire need of dialogue, understanding and tolerance on the one hand, and that is ever more economically competitive on the other, Canadian cities offer the ideal sites for gathering leaders and solution seekers representing the entire globe to address the most pressing problems. Environmental challenges left in the wake of a booming urban China with an insatiable need for fossil fuels; the lingering and still vast underdevelopment of rural China, which accounts for two thirds of the country’s population; sectarian strife and the urban-rural divide in an India that stakes its claim as an information technology powerhouse; the continuing economic stagnation and lack of democratic institution building in the vast majority of Muslim countries—such issues can be debated to positive effect in Canadian cities and institutions, where multicultural populations possess wide-ranging and in-depth knowledge about the world, especially about their countries of origin.

Building the Urban Link

The search for Canada’s international role must be anchored in the country’s domestic condition. Such an attempt must in turn focus on the condition of Canada’s largest cities, especially Toronto, since it is in these places that the world’s peoples live side by side in relative peace and harmony. A productive and mutually beneficial symbiosis is on display that can act as a model for many other countries, in the industrial and developing worlds alike, that are affected by ethnic, sectarian and religious strife. The World in a City, edited by Paul Anisef and Michael Lanphier, published two years ago by University of Toronto Press, is the most ambitious effort to date to take stock of Toronto’s global, multicultural reality.

The book covers issues ranging from peak periods of immigration to immigrants’ experiences with discrimination and the challenges facing newcomers—all aiming to discern the public policy implications of such research. In the first chapter, historian Harold Troper gives a comprehensive assessment of the history of Toronto as an immigrant point of entry. He describes the ways in which the city’s demographics have been transformed since World War II, documenting the shift in Canada from a predominantly Anglo Saxon society to a multicultural one within a relatively short period. Myer Siemiatycki and his colleagues describe the experiences of four major immigrant communities—Jewish, Italian, Caribbean and Chinese immigrants—to examine the challenges those immigrants faced as they have attempted in the post–World War II period to adapt to their new lives in Toronto. One of Troper’s key points is that immigration is an area of policy that affects all levels of government, even though it is the federal government, through Citizenship and Immigration Canada, that has jurisdiction over who is admitted to Canada as a visitor or permanent resident.

“If Toronto does not have an official role in determining immigration policy,” Troper writes, “immigration policy determines much about Toronto.” Toronto remains the destination of choice for close to half of all immigrants in Canada, as close to 100,000 new immigrants settle in the city and the regions that surround it every year. Immigration, Troper writes, has become the most significant force in reshaping Toronto’s neighbourhoods, its residential and commercial construction patterns, its economy and the delivery of municipal services, including education and health care.

After six decades of massive immigration, the Greater Toronto Area has become the most diverse and multicultural city-region in the world. Thus, a key question for Canadian policy makers is how best to use the talents and knowledge in Canada’s largest cities to promote equity and prosperity at the same time, both within and beyond Canada. One answer to this question is provided by Robert Greenhill in a report entitled “Making a Difference: External Views on Canada’s International Impact,” which he produced for the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. In a series of interviews conducted with international opinion leaders, one American suggested that “Canada could see itself as the world’s think tank. It could provide a market for clearheaded, slightly disinterested thinking.” A Canadian suggested that Canada can make a contribution by “taking a long-term view, being on the right side of the question, and then having the ideas and the processes to act at the right time.” Despite this concept of Canada as global think tank, however, Greenhill’s report overlooks the comparative advantage bequeathed to Canada by its diverse urban population. A global think tank can only be built on a globally aware and connected citizenry.

Remittances: Building the Links of Development

It is by now established among academics and bureaucrats in international organizations alike that remittances—the funds sent by residents in industrial countries to their places of origin— constitute a major source of income for the developing world. While reliable statistics on exactly how much is sent from the developed to the developing world are hard to find, and do not exist at all for some sending and receiving countries, the potential of remittances to alleviate some of the pains of global poverty is no longer in dispute. According to Michele Wucker of the World Policy Institute in New York, in 2003 alone some us$100 billion was sent to the developing world in global remittances, which is almost twice the total amount of development aid spent by all donor governments in that year. Remittances, Wucker claims, account for more than 10 percent of the gross domestic products of six Latin American nations. Among the poorer countries on the continent, the figures are even higher, reaching 29 percent in Nicaragua. In the cases of Haiti and Jamaica, remittances bring in more revenue than does foreign trade. Mexicans in the U.S. wire home US$14 billion a year, which, after oil exports, makes up Mexico’s largest source of foreign currency. India, another major recipient of remittances, takes in more than $10 billion in this fashion.

The fact that our ministry of finance does not yet possess reliable statistics on how much Canada sends to the developing world in the form of remittances indicates how underdeveloped this policy area is in this country. Nevertheless, various estimates put the number in the range of ca$2 to $4 billion per year. The Canadian International Development Agency has launched a program to support community research focused on the channels used and amounts remitted to Caribbean countries from Canada. It has also funded non-governmental organizations to explore the impact of Canadian diasporas in enhancing the development prospects of Latin America. Such interest in the role of remittances in alleviating poverty in the developing world is especially significant vis-àvis India, given the country’s growing global role and the high number of East Indians now living in Canada—700,000 and growing. In a partnership with the State Bank of India, which was signed last November, the two governments aim to extend remittance services and expand the available products that connect the two countries in this area, focusing on reducing the transaction costs of remittances, which now vary between 10 and 17 percent. The press release issued by the Department of Finance included the following statement:

To harness the potential of remittances more fully, however, developing countries must find ways to capture the skills and resources of their more educated and prosperous émigrés, such that brain drain can be turned into brain circulation. A good example of this, cited by Wucker, is provided in a study conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California: of the 2,300 foreign-born engineers in Silicon Valley, the study found that half travelled to their countries of origin at least once a year, and a similar number were found to have been involved in launching start-up companies in their countries of origin. This type of high-end association will noticeably improve the economic prospects of developing countries. “Beyond Remittances: The Role of Diaspora in Poverty Reduction in Their Countries of Origin,” a study funded by the British Department for International Development and conducted by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington DC, outlined the various policies on their diasporas that have recently been instituted by the governments of China, India, the Philippines and others. Canada is well positioned to commission Canadian experts to undertake similar studies.

Such ideas have also been reflected in the work of Jagdish Bhagwati, a leading economist of international trade at Columbia University. In an essay that appeared in Foreign Affairs in 2003, he advocated an approach to immigration in receiving countries that is based on the recognition that the flow of people into the U.S. and other wealthy countries simply cannot be stopped. Once this fact is acknowledged, he wrote, work can begin on managing immigration for the benefit of both receiving and sending countries. His website at Columbia states that his proposal in the 1970s that sending countries should tax their skilled émigrés represented a novel approach at that time, and that the concept of the so-called Bhagwati tax has now been revived by experts in international development.

Bhagwati advises sending countries to abandon the brain drain model of trying to keep their highly skilled labour force at home, and to adopt a diaspora model instead. “The diaspora model is superior from a human rights viewpoint,” he says, “because it builds on the right to emigrate, rather than trying to restrict it.” Bhagwati claims that the potential of such an approach to generate revenue for developing countries is indeed vast. The combined income of Indian-born U.S. residents amounts to 10 percent of India’s GDP, he says, even though these residents make up a mere 0.1 percent of the U.S. population. It is indeed time for a similar perspective to be applied to Canada, covering numerous countries with sizeable émigré populations in this country, especially those that play key roles in the international arena.

Such an approach is especially significant in regard to the expatriate Chinese, whose global number has reached over 35 million. Together, these members of the Chinese diaspora earn hundreds of billions of dollars a year and are the ideal conduits for the economic development of China, especially those rural areas still untouched by the country’s urban-based economic boom. This point is well made in an article by Paul Dillon and Estanislao Oziewicz on the role of the Chinese diaspora in a special feature on “China Rising” in The Globe and Mail last October, in which University of Saskatchewan sociologist Zong Li is quoted as saying that “the Chinese government sees the overseas Chinese as a very important force … Their strategy is that even if you physically move out of China, you can still make a contribution to China through business and investments, and culture.” University of Hyderabad sociologist Sadananda Sahoo has advised Indians to learn from the Chinese example since Chinese expatriates are now responsible for more than half of all foreign investment in China, investing some us$20 billion in their first homeland per year. Since there are more than a million people of Chinese descent in Canada, and since Canada receives some 40,000 new immigrants from China every year, it is essential to examine and harness not just the economic, but also the cultural and political interaction of Chinese Canadians with China.

Nurturing Global Knowledge and Solutions

A tremendous reservoir of knowledge and practical know-how exists in the largest Canadian cities about dozens of countries and all continents. The knowledge within Canada about the economic, political and cultural realities of the most vibrant economies and geopolitical pivot points, as well as the world’s poorest and most distressed regions, places Canada in a good position to develop responses to opportunities and challenges that require the cooperation of various peoples across Asia, Africa, the Americas and elsewhere. Canada is an ideal host for debate and reflection on the most pressing issues of international relations: the global struggles against poverty, disease and extremism. Up-todate and historically grounded knowledge and solutions about many parts of the world must be created and compiled for the benefit of Canada and others, especially by that subset of dual Canadian citizens who are as knowledgeable about the affairs and needs of their first homelands as they are of Canada, and increasingly sought after, for that reason, in both places.

For such people, the more their knowledge of Canada expands, and the more they are integrated into Canadian institutions, the better they will be able to act as builders of two-way cultural links and as investment and trade bridges between Canada and other countries. Such a trend can naturally evolve into the development of cadres of people who function as producers and transmitters of global knowledge. In their own lives, dual citizens have been made to see the world through at least two lenses and this makes them ideal bridges. Canada can utilize such talent for wealth creation and for expanding global equity.

Such human resources produce global knowledge and art that is displayed more and more often in Canadian-produced books, films, radio and television, newspapers and magazines. These expressions, in turn, help define not only the culture and capacities of such ethno-cultural communities in Canada, but the culture and capacities of original homelands as well.

A good place to look for the expression of global knowledge is the National Ethnic Press and Media Relations Council of Canada. A consortium of many hundreds of newspapers and other periodicals in various Canadian provinces, and covering dozens of languages and ethnicities, the council’s members offer information on the current realities of dozens of countries. In Toronto alone, there are hundreds of such outlets. Given the large number of entries on the council’s website, it is thus necessary to know which media to focus on as the best sites for reliable knowledge.

The vast potential of Canada as a repository of global knowledge and solutions is still largely untapped. One reason for this is that the expressions of cultural and economic insight about many countries appear only in the languages of these communities themselves, making that information accessible only to those who know Mandarin, Hindi, Persian, Spanish, Russian, etc. Second, Canada is relatively inexperienced in the academic study of other countries, and “area studies,” so well developed in the U.S. in the post–World War II period and a traditional strength of British scholarship, have found relatively faint expression in Canadian universities and think tanks so far. This must change. It is important to find and train academics who are experts on many countries, and to enable them to educate new cadres of undergraduate and postgraduate students in Canada who can go on to become the next generation of scholars and solution seekers to global challenges. Such academic expertise will naturally benefit from the vast knowledge about the world possessed by the many diasporas in Canada.

It is necessary to identify, for each ethnicity and country, their leading media outlets in Canada and to link their editors and publishers and producers to those who can select and translate into English the most substantive and rigorous essays, reports and books, as well as documentaries and films, that are being produced within Canada about different countries. This requires the input of fluently bilingual experts and translators who can act as bridges between their community and the broader Canadian society. Monitoring the best of ethnic cultural productions within Canada and translating that content into English is in itself a good way to expand crosscultural understanding, and simultaneously Canada’s knowledge of the world and Canada’s influence within it. Here the role of non-profit and charitable organizations is crucial. It is also important to take stock of all the leading civic and business organizations of the largest diasporas in Canada.

Such an effort should begin by taking stock of the international knowledge resources, and the leading experts already in Canada. For countries. such as China, India, Iran, Russia and Italy, it is necessary to identify the key experts on these countries and their community’s attributes in Canada, and then to commission the production of foundational knowledge resources that can cast light on the opportunities and challenges facing such countries and Canada, and ways of meeting them.

More so than in any industrial country, large majorities of Canadians see immigration as benefiting the country both economically and culturally. This, indeed, is what makes Canada unique, and in time such openness—if supported by strategic vision, solid research and political will—is likely to place Canada at the very centre of global dialogue and commerce, even more than it is today.