Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

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Connection between Demography and Geopolitics

My name is David Haglund, and I teach at the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University.

One of the easiest and earliest ways to approach the connection between demography and geopolitics was simply to ask: to what extent could countries be powerful or become great actors in the international system without a certain size of population? So there has been an understanding over time that you really have to have a threshold minimal population to consider that you are one of the great powers. How large that population should be is difficult to determine. It wasn’t too long ago that people thought countries like India and China were being held back, were less powerful than they might otherwise be, because they were too large and they had too many problems. Today, I suspect that to the extent we are concerned about the rise of China and the rise of India, it has a lot to do with the fact that they do have large populations. One thing is for certain: you must have a minimum population that exceeds what we have today in Canada to be considered among the ranks of the truly great with respect to the power criterion.

Apart from what I have been saying about how a properly sized population contributes to a country’s power standing, there is the related question of how many people you need to be prosperous. Because prosperity and economic capability also feed into who’s got international standing in the pecking order and who doesn’t. One of the big debates today in Western Europe—countries like Germany, for instance (and you see it a little bit in parts of Canada, for example in Quebec)—concerns the natality rate, the declining birth rate and the implications of this for the reproduction of the population, the stabilization of the population, and ideally the growth of the population, and all that this entails for the next generation of workers and how they will be able to pay for the retirees (like myself and others in my generation) when they retire in a few years and get used to the idea that they should have generous pensions. Someone has got to be working to support those pensions. This is an acute debate going on in Germany right now, among other countries. There is concern that not only will the falling birth rate lead to a shrinking population, which will somehow make the country stand out less in the international pecking order than it once did. But even more it will hurt prosperity and have a terrible impact on the ability to keep people at the living standard they’ve gotten used to.


The Concept of “New Fenianism” 

In terms of the size of our population, I don’t think there are terribly significant things to remark upon. Canada has been for a long time about one ninth to one tenth the size of the U.S. Even though relative to the U.S. we are taking in more immigrants, the U.S. still takes in a lot of immigrants. And when you add the illegal immigrants, who are by definition numbers we don’t know because we can’t count them, it’s probably safe to assume that the ratio between Canada and the U.S. (of 9 to 1, or 8.5 to 1, or 10 to 1) is going to persist for some time. Are there implications for that? I can’t think of any offhand.

Are there implications for the quality as opposed to the quantity of the demographic flows—does it matter where people are coming from? Historically, Canada got its immigrants from Europe. Those days are long gone. The question that now arises, to the extent that both Canada and the United States are sourcing most of their immigration from developing countries, as they do, is does it matter for their relationship that a large share of the U.S. immigration flow is coming from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and a significant share of the Canadian immigration flow is coming from Asia? You have the possibility that the two societies, to the extent they are diverging now, as Michael Adams claims, might diverge even more in the future as a result of different sources of immigration.

Then you have the problem, which should not be exaggerated but also should not be completely overlooked, that I call a “New Fenianism.” That is, is it likely that in importing people from various parts of the world we are going to “willy-nilly” import people who want to be here as a way to get into the United States to do something that neither American nor Canadian officials would want them to do? For example, launch terrorist strikes on American soil? Some might say this is exaggerated, but we obviously have on record the case of one Canadian “New Fenian” episode in 1999—the millennium bomber, Ahmed Ressam, who established himself in Canada for the purpose of attacking the United States.

When I say “New Fenianism” I mean to suggest a parallel with the Fenianism of the 19th century, when immigrant groups in the United States were trying to make attacks on Canada as a result of a grievance against Great Britain. In this case it was the Irish Americans, the Fenian Brotherhood, and the grievance was to secure the independence of Ireland. Canada played a useful role. It was an easy target for many of the Fenians who established themselves in the U.S. So there is, I suppose, that prospect, which will never go away and always requires vigilance on the part of the authorities. It is impossible to overstate the damage that could be done to the Canadian-American relationship if a devastating attack on American soil took place that could in some way be traced to Canadian soil.


The Cultural-Linguistic Split

There is a big debate in international relations among scholars as to whether in liberal democratic societies the impact of ethnic lobbying is beneficial or detrimental to the national interest. I don’t know whether it’s either. I just happen to think that it exists and you might as well recognize it. There’s no sense putting your head in the sand and saying this doesn’t happen or it shouldn’t happen. It does happen and you deal with it. There are plenty of cases in looking at the foreign policy of different countries where you could point to the role of interest groups established on a country’s soil as influential on foreign policy. For example, take the United States policy toward Cuba. It would be hard to understand, in the absence of the strategically well placed Cuban-American voting community in Florida, and secondarily in New Jersey, why U.S. policy toward Cuba in 2005 doesn’t look terribly different from U.S. policy toward Cuba in 1965. Whereas U.S. policy toward Vietnam in 2005 looks radically different from U.S. policy toward at least North Vietnam 40 years ago. You might want to ask to what extent domestic ethnic factors play a role in shaping foreign policy. Once you have been able to establish cases where there is such a role, then you could ask: is it good that this is happening or is it bad that this is happening? My message is simply that it does happen and we might as well accept that it happens.

The older question of differences within Canada on the part of the well-established, shall we say, ethnic communities—the English-speaking Canadians and the French-speaking Canadians—is once again revealing divergences on foreign policy grounds. It used to be taken as an article of faith—at least a hundred years ago and certainly for the first half of the 20th century—that any major international initiative involving Canada that ran the risk of getting Canadian soldiers deployed abroad would have elicited a different reaction from French Canada as opposed to English Canada: for example, the conscription crises of the First and Second World Wars and the whole adjustment of Canadian foreign policy in the interwar period to accommodate what were thought to be Quebec preferences. Or the attitude even before the First World War of the two founding nations, if you want, toward the Boer War. All of these issues, it used to be thought, disappeared with the rise of the U.S. to superpower status and the division of the world into a bipolar ideological conflict, where it was now the U.S. who would be organizing whatever overseas expeditionary initiatives that Canada got involved in on behalf of a cause that both English Canada and French Canada could more or less agree was good.

Recently some people have detected a re-emergence of that old cultural-linguistic split, looking at issues such as the Iraq war and missile defence, where it seems that one part of the country—Francophone Canada—has registered different judgments from the other part of the country, to the extent that national unity might be imperilled in the future if this split continues. I tend to minimize the national unity implications of whatever split there is between Francophone Canada and Anglophone Canada. The differences between now and the first half of the 20th century are so much greater than the similarities as to lead me to the conclusion that the harm that might be done to national unity is probably negligible.

Last Updated:2006-10-16

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