Review: The World in Canada
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| Author | Steven Holloway |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200906400221 |
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Financing Development is a useful, if sometimes awkward, addition to
the field of development finance. Students of multilateral organizations
(particularly the G8) will find that the first half of the book furnishes a solid
basis for further research. Students of development aid and finance will
likewise find the second half—especially on the links between the G8 and
Africa—informative. Few readers will find the entire volume worthwhile.
Amiel Blajchman/Globalis Group
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 Québécois, 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 Canada 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 impact 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...
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