John Stackhouse is a leading thinker on Canada’s place in the world and he contends that our country’s greatest untapped resource may be the three million Canadians who don’t live here.

Entrepreneurs, educators, humanitarians: an entire province’s worth of Canadian citizens live outside Canada. Some will return, others won’t. But what they all share is the ability, and often the desire, to export Canadian values to a world sorely in need of them. And to act as ambassadors for Canada in industries and societies where diplomatic efforts find little traction. Surely a country with people as diverse as Canada’s ought to plug itself into every corner of the globe. We don’t, and sometimes not even when our expats are eager to help.

Failing to put this desire to work, contends bestselling author and long-time foreign correspondent John Stackhouse, is a grave error for a small country whose voice is getting lost behind developing nations of rapidly increasing influence. The soft power we once boasted is getting softer, but we have an unparalleled resource, if we choose to use it. To ensure Canada’s place in the world, Stackhouse argues in Planet Canada, we need this exceptional province of expats and their special claim on the twenty-first century.

Join us as we virtually welcome John to CIC Victoria!

John Stackhouse is a nationally bestselling author and one of Canada’s leading voices on innovation and economic disruption. Since 2014, he has served as senior vice-president in the Office of the CEO at Royal Bank of Canada, leading the organization’s research and thought leadership on economic, technological and social change. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail and editor of Report on Business, and for most of the 1990s a foreign correspondent for the newspaper in Asia. He is a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.