Canada: Diaspora Communities

diaspora communities: She then went on to state that sometimes Ottawas foreign policy decision-making is logically inexplicable except by reference to a diaspora communitys pressure and votes and that those cases of egregious pandering to diaspora communities are not the rule in Canadas foreign policy-making neither with the Harper government nor with previous ones, according to The Star. According to data from the recently released National Household Survey on Immigration and Ethnocultural diversity in Canada, in 2011 more than 20 per cent of the total population in Canada is foreign-born. In the last five years, the largest source of immigrants to Canada was Asia including the Middle East , and most of these immigrants settled in the countrys largest urban centres. More importantly, the concentration of immigrant populations in specific parts of these urban centres means that they are the key to who wins these related political ridings. Justin Trudeau should take note and Thestar.com columnist Natalie Brender recently argued that Prime Minister Stephen Harpers decision to boycott the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting CHOGM in Sri Lanka this November is because of that countrys deteriorating human rights and governance record. Harpers purpose, she claims, is to convey principled condemnation of whats happening to human rights and democracy in Sri Lanka in a challenge to our claim that this is more obviously pandering to the Tamil diaspora in order to win votes. We could not disagree more. Whether one calls it pandering to specific groups, diaspora politics or creative statecraft, it is much more frequent than Brender thinks and it is also not going away anytime soon because of the political incentive structures shaped by Canadas demographic trends. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.