Canada’s Eleventh Province

Canada’s eleventh province is ready to work. It has been waiting for Canada to call.

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Somewhere out there is a province you will not find on any map of Canada.

It holds roughly three million people, more residents than six of our actual provinces, and it stretches from Silicon Valley to Singapore to London to Lagos. It is the province of Canadians abroad, and for most of our history, we have pretended it does not exist.

We are a country obsessed with who arrives. Nearly one in four people in Canada today was born somewhere else, the highest share in the G7, and our national conversation about migration flows almost entirely in one direction. Who comes in? How many? At what cost?

Meanwhile, an entire province’s worth of our citizens has quietly moved the other way, and Ottawa has never had an official strategy for engaging them. When the Asia Pacific Foundation studied the phenomenon, its then-CEO, Yuen Pau Woo, told The Globe and Mail that our national instinct treats expats as “either failed immigrants or disloyal Canadians.”

That attitude has cost us more than we know.

Learning About Diaspora

I learned what a diaspora can actually do in the summer of 2003, during a ceasefire in Sri Lanka’s civil war. Some friends and I had launched a program that sent Canadian university students to volunteer in the Tamil regions, and I found myself in Kilinochchi, teaching English and computer skills and helping set up libraries and community websites.

I arrived thinking I was there to give, but I left understanding how much the people living through that war had to teach us about what help should look like.

That seed grew into comdu.it, an organization I co-founded in 2016 to act as a conduit between diaspora professionals and post-war Sri Lanka. Since then, we have sent dozens of volunteers, engineers, social workers, researchers, and entrepreneurs from Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and Australia into projects across roughly 70 percent of the country’s districts.

A Toronto accountant strengthens the books of a Jaffna social enterprise. A German-Tamil developer teaches coding in Mannar. Individually, these are modest efforts. Collectively, they shifted the story of post-war recovery from dependency to partnership, and they earned recognition from Canadian and German diplomatic missions precisely because we were reaching places official channels could not.

The Reality

The reality is that this is not a Tamil story or a Sri Lankan story. It is the emerging global playbook. Best-selling author Elizabeth MacBride reported on how Armenia landed a data centre running Nvidia chips through its scattered global community, describing diaspora entrepreneurs operating as “de facto economic developers, strategic advisors, and innovation catalysts.”

Oludolapo Makinde made the financial case in Forbes as well, reporting on billions in remittances shifting toward investment and noting that, unlike venture capital, “diaspora finance offers a seat at the table.” Ireland, India, Israel, and the Philippines figured this out decades ago. They host diaspora conferences, track expatriate talent, and treat citizens abroad as national infrastructure.

Canada, by contrast, leaves the work to volunteers. The C100 network in Silicon Valley, founded by Canadian tech entrepreneurs, has mentored startups, pushed for faster visas, and helped shape our national AI strategy, all without a mandate from anyone.

Imagine what an actual strategy could do.

Invest In the Eleventh Province

Getting there requires retiring a phrase.

For thirty years, we have talked about brain drain, as if every Canadian who leaves is lost forever. The better frame is brain circulation, a loop in which people go out, gain skills and networks, and then come back or stay connected.

Right now, we break the loop at both ends. Expats who try to return find their decade in London or Nairobi treated as a gap in the resume rather than an asset, and investors wave off international track records as not North American enough. If someone has been operating at the cutting edge abroad, we should treat them like gold, not make them start over.

So here is my proposal for an impolite Canada. Build a real diaspora engagement strategy, with the communities themselves at the table. Make established diaspora executives official trade envoys in the markets they know intimately. Back diaspora-led initiatives as legitimate development and diplomacy actors, not curiosities. And update the national narrative so that being Canadian can mean living in Toronto, London, or Mumbai and still building this country.

We love saying Canada punches above its weight. The truth is that our weight class includes all of our people, wherever they happen to live. The secret province is ready to work. It has been waiting for Canada to call.