Review: The World in Canada

THE WORLD IN CANADA Diaspora, Demography, and Domestic Politics David Carment and David Bercuson, editors Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. 256pp, $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-7735-3297-7)As the co-editors, David Carment and David Bercuson, suggest in their introduction, the purpose of this book is to survey the recent changes in Canada's ethnic mosaic and assess the impacts of those changes on foreign policy (4). In the chapters that follow, the focus appears to be on recent immigrant communities and the Quebecois, while older minority communities such as First Nations and Ukrainians are missed out. They admit to an assumption of linkage politics, the notion that a porous domestic-international divide ensures that foreign policy elites must to some extent adapt their goals to reflect their constituents' opinions (5). Long-term demographic change within at the very least constrains future foreign policy goals.The first chapter immediately confounds the reader. Taking the Canada as small-power thesis to an extreme, Adam Chapnick argues that the question of the prime minister's on Canadian foreign policymaking is largely irrelevant because the office's occupants have rarely had a measureable impact on international affairs (16). He supports this extreme position with dubious claims, for instance by arguing that the Canada-US free trade agreement lacks significance for anyone in the long run. Regardless of the veracity of his revisionist thesis, the reader must ask how this piece is relevant to the rest of the collection. Indeed the basic claim that Canadian policy is insignificant threatens to undercut the whole purpose of the book.A better introduction to the collection is the second chapter, Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon's overview of immigration to and its on Canadian foreign After a brief description of the major immigration trends, she surveys the foreign policy interests of recent immigrant communities, including attitudes towards a more liberal immigration and refugee policy and ties to home countries. She also assesses their potential for influence through the electoral process and NGOs.In the first half of chapter 3, Andrew Harrington, Stewart Prest, and Per Unheim present interesting case studies of the criminal connections between Jamaica and Haiti and their respective diasporas in Toronto and Montreal. They argue that criminal deportation and illegal immigration have fostered a transnational conduit between and the Caribbean for drugs and criminal gangs. This study is the most information-intensive in the collection (as its large number of footnotes attests) and may provide readers with data they would not otherwise encounter. The authors then shift focus to show how this transnational conduit might be used to alleviate the chronic poverty and instability in the diasporas' home countries. But this approach then begs for a similar analysis of the conduit's on the Canadian state.J.L. Granatstein wants to discuss this in chapter 4, Multiculturalism and Canadian foreign policy. He poses a series of provocative questions: does a policy of multiculturalism lead inevitably to foreign policy pacifism and neutralism? What happens when dual loyalties conflict? What duties do immigrants have to their new state? How active can they remain in the politics of their state of birth (up to and including terrorism)? These are important questions and could be debated on their own moral grounds. But Granatstein reverts to the old dichotomy between national interests and values and argues that only the former should determine foreign The frailness of this bifurcation is evident in the fifth national interest he enumerates - work with like-minded states for the protection and enhancement of democracy and freedom - which is clearly value -laden (80). (Granatstein' s five national interests are very similar to my own scheme except that mine keeps the ideological one - the projection of a national identity - generic and requires no dichotomy between values and interests. …

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