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November/December 2004 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Canada: global citizen In-depth: Canada’ place The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

He passed his hand above the assembled gathering and then urged everyone to recall how Canada’s political and moral support had helped bring an end to apartheid in his native South Africa. Had Canada not followed his call for economic sanctions, he implied, his country might still be mired in institutional racism. Then the charismatic Anglican passed his hand over the crowd in the other direction and said, "Now you can be Canadians again, quiet and polite."

In fact, Canadians these days very often come from Africa — and Tibet and Iran and everywhere — and live ever farther from the pale diffidence of old stereotype. And yet the fact remains that when these three great voices of global responsibility came together to discuss how to bring peace and freedom to the planetary neighbourhood, they chose to do so not in London or Paris or New York but in Canada. Canada has become the spiritual home, you could say, of the very notion of an extended, emancipating global citizenship.

We all know that Canada has worked hard to turn the multicultural reality of the modern urban world into an opportunity. Cities like Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver are home now to singers from Senegal and novelists from Sri Lanka, to India-Pakistan cricket matches and festivals from the Caribbean. In the 1960s, when I was growing up (I was born in England to parents from India, raised in California and live now in Japan), barely three percent of Toronto’s people were "visible minorities." Now the figure comes to more than 50 percent.

But even the many Canadians who live far from these rapidly changing cities or whose communities are largely unchanged since Queen Victoria’s time have seen their lives transformed by the country’s determination to stage a radical experiment, in the wake of Pierre Trudeau’s inclusive immigration policies, that has given Canadians a sense of connection to both their homes and the world.

Yet what is harder to appreciate, especially if you’re at home in the Yukon or small-town Manitoba or in a Newfoundland outport, is that even as more and more of the world is in Canada, Canada is in more and more of the world. Travelling across the globe for 40 years now, I’ve met Canadians, disproportionally numerous, at every turn: aid workers and diplomats and engineers and just plain travellers taking the spirit of hopefulness and exploration and practical know-how that seems to arise out of the country’s wide expanses and seeing how they can uncover a different kind of world.

The person who showed me around Bangkok my first day in Southeast Asia was a friendly, young would-be entrepreneur from Ottawa; and not long ago, on a plane, I found myself next to a grandmother from Saskatchewan who, when her husband died, decided that she might as well go and see the world (she was returning from three months in a small town in Mexico when I met her). I ushered in the 21st century in a tiny Tibetan café on Easter Island with two adventurous Torontonians who had brought themselves to a place where few Europeans or Americans were in evidence.

And two years earlier, on another New Year’s Day, as I viewed the great carvings that swarm around Cambodia’s central monument, Angkor Wat, I saw two Khmer Rouge leaders walking as fellow sightseers, unprotected, through a city they had orphaned. A Cambodian beside me clutched the ancient pillar nearby so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He was a Canadian now, he informed me, and had managed to escape to freedom and safety after the Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million of his countrymen, including his mother and father. Having made it to the comfort and ease of Ottawa, though, he felt he owed it to his old compatriots, and his new ones, to come back to Cambodia and try to help it toward the peace and prosperity it so desperately needed.

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