CANADA PROGRAM SEMINAR

Unsettling and Resettling Canada
AUDREY MACKLIN
University of Toronto

Canada, like the United States, is a settler society that defines itself as a country of immigration. This is not merely an empirical claim -- which would apply to innumerable states in the world today -- but also a claim that is imbued with a normative hue: Canada asserts its identity as a nation constituted through immigration, which it pursue assiduously through state policy and celebrates in the national narrative. Yet in the last decade, Canadian immigration policy began to drift away from the policies that typified settler societies over the last 150 years, and toward policy tools and discourses more typical of 'old world' European states. (This, of course, was happening even as European states were openly looking to Canada as a model). This is what I call the 'unsettling' of Canada. In recent months, the Canadian government and private citizens have mobilized to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. While the numbers are tiny as a proportion of refugees hosted by front line states, or even relative to those arriving on their own in Germany, Sweden and other EU states, they exceed the resettlement commitments made by the US, UK and France. I will argue that, apart from the practical impact of Canadian refugee resettlement, the mobilization of public and private resources for refugee resettlement signifies a moment of reclamation of a particular narrative of Canada. Engagement in refugee sponsorship can thus be understood as an act of citizenship by existing Canadians as much as a process that will produce new Canadians. This is what I call the 'resettling' of Canada.

... Read more about Unsettling and Resettling Canada