In a plaza in Scarborough, in the eastern reaches of Toronto, you can eat pepperpot and buy a phone card to Georgetown and hear the news from home traded across a counter in the cadence of the Guyanese coast. It is one of the largest concentrations of Guyanese people anywhere outside Guyana itself — and lately the news from home has been extraordinary, because the country these families left, long one of the poorest corners of South America, has become the fastest-growing economy on the planet.
The cause is oil, and a lot of it. Since major discoveries off its coast — some 11 billion barrels in all — Guyana has gone from an afterthought to a petrostate at fantastical speed. Its economy is projected to grow another 16 percent in 2026, on top of years of double-digit expansion; output neared 900,000 barrels a day by the end of 2025 as new projects came online. In the space of about six years, GDP per person leapt from roughly 6,000 dollars to 34,000. There is no modern precedent for a transformation this fast in a country this small.
The Canadian connection runs through people
Guyana is, by history and self-identification, a Caribbean nation — a member of CARICOM, English-speaking, culturally tied to the islands even though it sits on the South American mainland. And its connection to Canada runs, as so much of the Caribbean relationship does, through migration. Roughly 100,000 people of Guyanese origin live in Canada, heavily concentrated in the Greater Toronto Area; in parts of Scarborough, Guyana ranks among the largest single birthplaces of immigrants. This is a decades-old, deeply rooted community, and the oil boom has suddenly given it a homeland with money, ambition and a hunger for exactly the skills and capital its diaspora holds.
Georgetown has noticed. Guyana’s government created a diaspora unit expressly to court the expertise and investment of Guyanese abroad, recognizing that a small country trying to build an economy at breakneck speed needs the engineers, doctors, financiers and entrepreneurs it once exported. For the Canadian-Guyanese community, the boom is an invitation — to invest, to return, to build — that did not exist a decade ago.
The shadow over the boom
It would be easy to write this as an unqualified good-news story, and it is not one. Hanging over Guyana’s windfall is the oldest curse in development economics: the resource curse, the grimly reliable tendency of sudden oil wealth to corrode the institutions of the countries it lands on. Rapid petro-money can inflate a currency and hollow out other industries, concentrate wealth and power, invite corruption, and leave a country more unequal and more fragile than before the oil came. Guyana has weak institutions, a history of ethnic political division, and now one of the largest per-capita oil endowments on earth. The ingredients of both a miracle and a disaster are present in the same place.
This is where the diaspora becomes more than sentiment. A hundred thousand Guyanese-Canadians represent a reservoir of exactly what a young petrostate needs to avoid the curse — professional expertise, institutional experience, capital that thinks in decades. Whether they engage as partners in building something durable, or simply as absentee beneficiaries of a boom, is one of the quiet questions that will help determine which way Guyana goes. And it makes this the most dynamic, least predictable node in Canada’s entire Caribbean relationship: a tie that no strategy document anticipated, running through a Toronto suburb to a country remaking itself in real time.
The pepperpot will keep selling in Scarborough either way. But the conversations across those counters have changed. They are no longer only about what was left behind. Increasingly, they are about what might be built — and whether the people who left will help build it.