Canada Among Nations 2008

"Published for the Norman Paterson School of International Affaris, Carleton University, in cooperation with The Centre for International Governance Innovation."

Rare insights into Canada and Canadian foreign policy by leading foreign and Canadian policy thinkers and doers.

This year's edition of Canada Among Nations offers a critical overview of a number of landmarks in the last hundred years of Canadian foreign policy. The editors take a critical look at the now almost mainstream "declinist" thesis and at the continued relevance of Canada's relationships with its principal allies - the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Contributors discuss a broad range of themes, including the weight of a changing identity in the evolution of the country's foreign policy, the fate of Canadian diplomacy as a profession, the often complicated relationship between foreign and trade policies, the impact of immigration and refugee procedures on foreign policy, and the evolving understanding of development and defence as components of Canada's foreign policy.

Canada Among Nations is produced by The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University and The Centre for International Governance Innovation.

In the decade following the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, economic and political relations between Canada and Mexico have expanded significantly. Today, Canada and Mexico are each other's third largest trading partners and, outside of the United States, Mexico is the second largest tourist and business destination for Canadians. In the face of increasing competition from Asia, Canada and Mexico need to strengthen their economic competitiveness by leveraging their comparative advantages more effectively. In a multi-polar world, Canada and Mexico have an opportunity to utilize their North-South partnership to provide leadership on the pressing issues of our time, such as climate change, transnational crime, and global crisis management. In Canada Among Nations, 2011-2012 a leading group of Canadian, Mexican, and American academics, policy makers, politicians, journalists, and energy and climate change experts offer substantive recommendations for Ottawa and Mexico City to realise the full potential of their strategic relationship. Canada Among Nations is the premier source for contemporary insight into pressing Canadian foreign policy issues. This volume continues that tradition by providing students, policy makers, and business people with a timely compendium of expert opinion on Canada-Mexico relations.

“It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residential schools and released several reports based on 7000 survivor statements and five million documents from government, churches, and schools, as well as a solid grounding in secondary sources. A Knock on the Door, published in collaboration with the National Research Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, gathers material from the several reports the TRC has produced to present the essential history and legacy of residential schools in a concise and accessible package that includes new materials to help inform and contextualize the journey to reconciliation that Canadians are now embarked upon. Survivor and former National Chief of the Assembly First Nations, Phil Fontaine, provides a Foreword, and an Afterword introduces the holdings and opportunities of the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, home to the archive of recordings, and documents collected by the TRC. As Aimée Craft writes in the Afterword, knowing the historical backdrop of residential schooling and its legacy is essential to the work of reconciliation. In the past, agents of the Canadian state knocked on the doors of Indigenous families to take the children to school. Now, the Survivors have shared their truths and knocked back. It is time for Canadians to open the door to mutual understanding, respect, and reconciliation.