Planet Canada: How Our Expats Are Shaping the Future

by John Stackhouse

Overview

A leading thinker on Canada's place in the world contends that our country's greatest untapped resource may be the three million Canadians who don't live here.

Entrepreneurs, educators, humanitarians: an entire province's worth of Canadian citizens live outside Canada. Some will return, others won't. But what they all share is the ability, and often the desire, to export Canadian values to a world sorely in need of them. And to act as ambassadors for Canada in industries and societies where diplomatic efforts find little traction. Surely a country with people as diverse as Canada's ought to plug itself into every corner of the globe. We don't, and sometimes not even when our expats are eager to help.

Failing to put this desire to work, contends bestselling author and longtime foreign correspondent John Stackhouse, is a grave error for a small country whose voice is getting lost behind developing nations of rapidly increasing influence. The soft power we once boasted is getting softer, but we have an unparalleled resource, if we choose to use it. To ensure Canada's place in the world, Stackhouse argues in Planet Canada, we need this exceptional province of expats and their special claim on the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345815828
Publisher:	Random House of Canada, Limited
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

JOHN STACKHOUSE is a nationally bestselling author and longtime foreign correspondent for the Globe and Mail and editor of Report on Business. In 2009, he became the national newspaper's editor-in-chief, a position he held for five years. He is a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, and the author of books Out of Poverty: And Into Something More Comfortable, Timbit Nation: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Canada and Mass Disruption:Thirty Years on the Front Lines of a Media Revolution. He presently serves as senior vice-president in the office of the CEO at Royal Bank Canada.

Table of Contents

Introduction | The Eleventh Province 1

1 Outliers: What it Means to be Canadian in the Twenty-First Century 11

2 Missionaries, Mathematicians and Misfits: How Canadians Reinvented the Modern World 30

3 The Optimization Game: The Northern Techies Who built a Newsilicon Valley 46

4 Putting the Crazy Back in Canuck: The C100's Quiet Campaign to Change a Country 65

5 Pragmatic Dreamers: Canadian Storytellers in the Age of Identity 85

6 Humour, Humility and Chutzpah: How to be a Canadian Star on Asian Youtube 102

7 Architects of Change: Inside the Greening of China's Building Boom 113

8 Lindsay of Arabia: The Importance of Being Canadian in a More Combative World 136

9 Justice Hunters: Taking Peace, Order and Good Government to a Broken World 154

10 The Opposable Minds of Globalization: How to Rewire Capitalism and Save It, Too 175

11 How Very Canadian: Exporting Legal Principles to Combat Populism 193

12 Diaspora Diplomacy: What We Can Learn From Israel, India and Ireland 213

13 A Diaspora That Looks Like the World: Hyphenated Canadians, Dual Citizens and a Changing Global Face 232

14 Our Stay-at-Home Students: The Struggle to Send Young Canadians Abroad 247

15 A Global Brain Trust: How to Get Over "Brain Drain" and build a Worldwide Web of Canadians 263

Conclusion | The Everywhere People: Being Canadian in the Age of Identity 278

Acknowledgements 293

Notes 299

Bibliography 331

Index 339

Editorial Reviews

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BUSINESS BOOK AWARD

“Planet Canada is an enthralling guided tour through the uncharted lands of Canada’s ‘undeclared eleventh province.’ This missing piece of our population has an outsized influence on the shape of the world and, potentially, the fate of our country—yet it was nameless and undocumented until John Stackhouse embarked on this extraordinary journey through its workshops, concert halls, executive suites and laboratories, revealing a second Canada that is both a missed opportunity and a potential storehouse of future success.” —Doug Saunders, bestselling author of Arrival City and Maximum Canada

“John Stackhouse is an eminently wise and thoughtful observer of Canada’s place on the world’s stage. In Planet Canada, he offers a nuanced analysis of how the Canadian diaspora is capitalizing on their uniquely Canadian qualities and makes a case for us, as an evolving middle-power nation, to make the most of them.” —The Right Honourable David Johnston, Canada's 28th Governor General

“In Planet Canada, John Stackhouse motivates us to rethink the axis of our globetrotting expats, and makes a compelling case for ensuring that the right structures are in place towards achieving the desired ‘boomerang effect,’ ultimately leveraging our diverse diaspora as a fundamental Canadian asset.” —Nurjehan Mawani, distinguished Canadian civil servant and diplomat

From the Publisher