Canada’s official development assistance, humanitarian-response capacity, and engagement with fragile and conflict-affected states, including its role in multilateral institutions.
As Canadian banks cash out of the region, Ottawa is arriving in new guises: underwriting climate debt, funding a force in Haiti, importing farm labour, watching Guyana boom. The relationship is being rewritten on every front at once.
A First-Loss Portfolio Credit Guarantee is not the sort of phrase that makes headlines. But it is how Ottawa is now trying to keep small island states solvent against rising seas, with financial engineering, not aid cheques.
Every August, Toronto stages the largest Caribbean carnival in North America. It is the most visible, most lucrative strand of the Canada–Caribbean relationship, and it runs on diaspora labour that spent decades fighting to be counted.
Guyana struck 11 billion barrels of oil and became the fastest-growing economy on earth. Nearly 100,000 Guyanese-Canadians, clustered in the Toronto suburbs, are watching a homeland transform.
The country produces musicians, writers and actors at a rate rivalling Britain's, and has almost no strategy for turning any of it into influence. The recurring Eurovision debate is a way into why.
A publicly owned utility firm from Winnipeg advises power grids in more than a hundred countries. It was shut down in 2021, quietly restarted in 2024, and fills a niche almost no one else can.