Canada’s Blind Spot: Culture as Strategic Infrastructure |
The world is undergoing a narrative shift that is already reshaping global power. States no longer derive influence solely from military alliances or economic size. Increasingly, they shape their position through the cultural institutions that organize meaning: museums, biennials, archives, digital heritage systems, and the creative industries that frame how modernity is understood. In this new landscape, narrative capacity is geopolitical capacity.
What is emerging is a meaning-making economy that operates across screens and physical institutions alike. It includes the museums that determine how history is displayed, the archives that decide what is preserved, the design studios and production houses that shape visual culture, the streaming platforms and social media networks that organize global attention, and the cultural districts that anchor civic identity. Together, these systems form an ecosystem that produces the stories through which societies interpret themselves and others. It is an economy of symbols, images, narratives, and curatorial decisions. It influences how nations imagine their past, how they understand their present, and which futures appear possible. It is also an economy that generates measurable value, attracting tourism, investment, talent, and diplomatic engagement. Power now circulates through this ecosystem as much as through traditional political or economic channels.
This shift coincides with the collapse of older civilizational frameworks. The grand narratives that once cast entire cultures as singular historical actors have broken apart, leaving no stable script for how the world imagines itself. In their place has emerged a global competition to build the cultural infrastructures that will shape new narratives of civilisation and identity. Some states recognise this and are moving decisively. Canada is not among them.
Carney’s Gulf Visit
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent visit to the Gulf prior to the G20 leaders’ summit in Johannesburg, South Africa illustrates the problem with clarity. Carney presented his trip to Abu Dhabi as a strategic pivot away from the United States, yet the investment talks he continues to champion have been in motion for more than a decade through the Canada–UAE Business Council, founded in 2013 and backed by firms such as TD Securities, Telus, BlackBerry, CAE, and Brookfield, where Carney himself previously served as a vice-chair. The visit also followed closely on the heels of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who travelled to Abu Dhabi to inaugurate the province’s new international office.
The Carney trip, focused on trade, underlined the importance of artificial intelligence (AI), economic diversification, and technological collaboration. These priorities are legitimate, but the visit ignored the domain in which the Gulf is actually concentrating its long-term........