Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter Six
Immigrant Reception: Contesting
Globalization… or Resistant Racism?
The federal government facilitated settlement for wealthy arrivals in Canada
with business immigration streams tailored to fit their circumstances
and with the welcoming blanket of multiculturalism as a comforter. But
immigrants, and investment, never touch down in unclaimed land or unoc-
cupied space, and participation in the real estate market brought new arriv-
als to districts whose land use planning is managed by municipal government
responsive to local citizens and their priorities. Any 'flat world' promised to
millionaire migrants as they entered Canada was complicated by the lump-
iness of this pre-existing local political geography, by the vagaries of cross-
jurisdictional 'political difference' (Newendorp 2008). The deployment of
off-shore wealth in the urban land market was causing some sharp local
controversies by 1988 that threatened to jump scale to the international
level. Several paths converged to contribute to that friction, and a broader
historical analysis is required to recognize the role of each of them.
Investment from East Asia arrived into a fractious national geography
where Canadians had already resisted the sovereignty implications of the flat
world of open borders in multiple forms and at all three levels of govern-
ment. Federally, the Trudeau administrations of the 1970s had promoted a
national project that encouraged a politics of suspicion in opening national
borders too widely to foreign investment.
1
Moreover, the anxiety of the
Québecois, no longer
maîtres chez nous
, had rubbed off onto a larger national
concern in the 1980s concerning vulnerabilities about cultural and eco-
nomic domination by the United States. These anxieties came to a head
during the negotiations that established the Canada-United States Free
Trade Agreement (CUFTA) in 1989, leaving the Canadian population
sharply polarized.
2
At a provincial scale, the neo-liberal initiatives of the Social
Credit government in British Columbia were earnestly resisted by the deep-
rooted labour movement and its supporters; even the world-beckoning
