Book Review: Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada’s Cultural Diplomacy
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231180121 |
| Author | Asa McKercher |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Although the book focuses on the period between 2001 and 2021 to illustrate how
containing diversity works, it also shows how Canada’s colonial roots still impact its
immigration policy. For this reason, Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel make a sig-
nificant contribution to the contemporary literature on immigration in Canada.
Echoing Abu-Laban and Gabriel’s earlier arguments in Selling Diversity,
3
this latest
book illustrates the paradox between Canada’s mechanisms of exclusion and its
efforts to embrace diversity through liberal discourse on openness, multiculturalism
policies, and public support for immigration. In this sense, Canada is far from being
an “exception”in the twenty-first century immigration landscape. The use of an
ethics-of-care perspective combined with critical political economy opens new
avenues to rethink immigration in Canada, instead of seeing migrants as numbers or
quantifiable objects that would contribute to certain neo-liberal objectives. One of
the most exciting contributions to the immigration literature in the last few years,
Containing Diversity is a valuable resource not only for migration scholars, but also
for policy analysts, as well as immigrants themselves who wish to learn about
Canadian immigration policies.
Eric Fillion,
Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada’s Cultural Diplomacy.
Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. Cloth ($130) Paper ($39.95)
ISBN: 978-0-2280-1415-7
Reviewed by: Asa McKercher (asa.mckercher@rmc-cmr.ca), Royal Military College of
Canada, Canada
DOI: 10.1177/00207020231180121
Shortly after Justin Trudeau’s government formed in 2015, two paintings by Quebec artist
Alfred Pellan were put up in the lobby of the Lester B. Pearson building, headquarters of
the recently renamed Global Affairs Canada. The two modernist landscapes, Canada East
and Canada West, had become a source of controversy when, in 2011, Conservative
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird had ordered the paintings removed in place of a por-
trait of Queen Elizabeth II. Quebecois nationalists saw the move as typical of the Stephen
Harper government’s inattention to their province’s culture. And so the Trudeau’sgovern-
ment’s restoration of the paintings was a soptoQuebec.Butitalsoseemedtoreflect the
new primeminister’s“sunny ways”rhetoric about Canada being “back”asa player on the
world stage. Whatever the value of displaying the landscapes versus an image of Canada’s
sovereign, that Pellan’s paintings would hang prominently in Canada’s foreign ministry is
no surprise. The images were commissioned in 1942 by Jean Désy, then Canada’s
3. Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Christina Gabriel, Selling Diversity: Immigration Multiculturalism,
Employment Equity, and Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
Book Reviews 287
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