Diaspora politics is a main source of influence in countries hosting sizeable immigrant communities, especially those whose native nationalities have been almost completely wiped out and who have completely been rebuilt by immigrants. Such groups tend to try to influence countries in various ways, for example through NGOs, voting blocs, and religious and social institutions. The aims of these pressures can be various. Sometimes the scope is just about promoting productive relations with their home countries or fighting against negative stereotypes (the Italian Americans are a good case in point); but, in other cases, the point is about promoting awareness over their stance on some conflicts their countries are involved in and influencing governments to do the same. The effectiveness of these pressures depends on a number of reasons, such as the cultural closeness with the majority culture, the ultimate aim of the pressures and the alignment to the foreign policy priorities of the hosting countries.
The difference between the Russian and the Ukrainian diasporas in Canada are indicative of the role played by the alignment among diaspora groups. Let’s start with the former. Although perhaps less known than the Russian American diaspora, the Russian Canadian diaspora is still rather sizeable, with over 622,000 Canadians claiming full or partial Russian ancestry. The first Russians arrived in Canada around the second half of the 19th century, with many of them belonging to religious minorities and Russian subethnoi, such as Doukhobors, Old Believers, Jews and Mennonites. Another wave followed after the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Some of them went back to their homeland after the end of the Civil War; but others remained, especially those who left the country because they opposed Communism: among them, the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the sister of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II, and Count Paul Ignatieff, who was the Education Minister under Tsar Nicholas II. He would become the father of George Ignatieff, a prominent Canadian diplomat, and the grandfather of Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party – one of the two main Canadian parties, led by the current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau until recently – between 2008 and 2011. Finally, but not least, the Russian diaspora in Canada is also made of people who migrated in search of opportunities, especially during the tumultuous years which followed the collapse of the USSR, and their descendants.
As put by David Carment and Danika Brown of the Carleton University of Ottawa, alignment creates a clear wedge between those groups which are “allowed” to influence a country’s foreign policy in a sense which is favourable to their interests and those who are not. In some cases, this can create self-evident double standards, as it happens in the U.S. between Russian and China on the one hand – routinely accused of meddling into American affairs – and countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, whose illicit influence operations encounter little reprival. In other cases, more mildly, non-aligned diaspora groups are simply ignored: an example is the Palestinian one, whose influence on Ottawa’s foreign policy is very limited in spite of the public support enjoyed by the Palestinian cause. Something similar happens for the Russian diaspora, whose alignment with the priorities of the Canadian government is close to zero.
Some organisations, such as the Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance (RCDA) – recognised as an undesirable organisation in Russia on 13th March 2024 as per Prosecutor General’s decision – and the Canadian Center for the Development of Democracy in Russia (CCDR) – recognised as an undesirable organisation in Russia on 17th December 2024 as per Prosecutor General’s decision –, enjoy some kind of public support from Canadian institutions and political parties – the latter’s leader Kirill Lyagushev is also a member of the Conservative Party of Canada and used to be a representative of pro-Ukrainian Russian political organisations –, but they are little more than just tools to promote the positions of the “Collective West” on the main issues dividing it from Russia, starting from the Ukrainian Crisis. They have virtually no impact on the Canadian government, which uses these organisations to promote narratives rather than to gather consensus, or on the Russian public, which is likely to see them as “traitors” for their support of sanctions and supplies of weaponry to Ukraine.
Due to their tiny following, even in Canada, organisations such as the RCDA and the CCDR are highly unlikely to play any major role for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, given Canada’s long-standing anti-Russian foreign policy, NGOs with actual connection with Russian entities – be they government institutions or businesses – have often found themselves on the wrong side of the aforementioned wedge, especially after 24th February 2022. An example is the Canada Eurasia Russia Business Association (CERBA), which used to promote business relations between companies and operators from Canada, Russia and other FSU countries. The association has offices in various Canadian cities, as well as in Russia (Moscow) and Kazakhstan (Almaty), and its partners include several companies from both Canada and CIS countries, especially in the mining industry; but, after the launch of the Special Military Operation and in the wake of the cancel culture which affected anything Russia-related in many Western countries in its aftermath, the organisation rebranded itself as Canada Eurasia Chamber of Commerce (CECC) and dropped any reference to Russia on its official mission.
But the main source of Canadian NGO involvement in Russian-related issues comes from the Ukrainian diaspora ones. Canada hosts one of the largest Ukrainian diasporas in the world, with around 1.36 million people (out of a total of 44 million Canadians) claiming “Ukrainian” as (at least one of) their ancestry on the 2016 census, and this minority is particularly strong in three Western Canadian provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba), where the first immigrants took advantage of the bloc settlement policy to establish some sort of ethnic colonies where they mostly lived with other Ukrainians and usually spoke Ukrainian Canadian until the middle of the 20th century. Ukrainians have now been mostly assimilated into the wider Canadian society and many of them have left their former ethnic enclaves, which now present a more heterogeneous population, while still keeping many signs of their first inhabitants such as Ukrainian Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches; but, as it often happens with diasporas, the Ukrainian Canadian one keeps a strong sense of identity and a strong intimate connection with its ancestral homeland, notwithstanding the fact that the first settlers arrived in the late-19th century and most of its members neither speak Ukrainian (or Russian) nor have a living ancestor who was born in Gogol’s homeland.
The “Ukrainian” feeling of these Canadians can be dismissed as some sort of romantic attachment to an idealised ancestral land which exists only in their mind, tied to an overall lack of experience about it; the same attitude, for example, of some Irish Americans, who feel “Irish” even though their ancestors migrated to the United States in the 19th century – often intermingled with non-Irish immigrants – so gaining the nickname “Plastic Paddies” (e.g.: “Paddy” is a nickname for an Irish person). In both cases, nevertheless, this attachment has self-evident political repercussions: as Irish Americans tend to sympathise for Irish nationalism and devote to the cause of the Irish unification and of the Catholic population of Northern Ireland, Ukrainian Canadians tend to support Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian irredentism and the Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine, and those politicians who want to get their support have to devote to their causes as well.
Mostly stemming from the former Austro-Hungarian provinces in the West, the homeland of Ukrainian ultranationalism, or from anti-Communist fighters who left the country after the October Revolution or during the Cold War (including a number of former Nazis, as we are going to see later on), the Ukrainian diaspora is one of Canada’s most politically organised ones. Its nationalism and support for Ukraine joining the EU and NATO is also shared by the main Canadian-based Ukrainian NGOs, namely the Ukrainian World Congress – recognised as an undesirable organisation in Russia on 11th July 2019 as per Prosecutor General’s decision –, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada – both recognised as undesirable organisations in Russia on 4th August 2022 as per Prosecutor General’s decision –; and, unlike what happens for the Russian one, the priorities of the Ukrainian diaspora are strongly aligned with those of the Canadian government.
The consequences are easy to guess. Canada was the first country to recognise Ukraine as an independent state in 1991, provided financial and organisational support to the 2004 Orange Revolution, and the same happened ten years later during Euromaidan, when both the Canadian government and the main Ukrainian Canadian NGOs provided diplomatic, financial and logistical support to the rioters. It should be remarked that Ottawa started (officially) supplying weapons to Ukraine before the United States themselves; and, while Ottawa has not played a role of draft horse of the United States during the crisis, unlike the United Kingdom, nor is it likely to join any possible “peacekeeping” mission in Ukraine, Trudeau’s current stance on the crisis is way closer to Starmer’s than to Trump’s.
As a whole, Canada played a secondary role in the Ukrainian Crisis, as shown by the limited weight of its supplies of weapons to Ukraine; but, unlike what happens for most Western countries, the main source of its support for Ukraine does not actually come from its weapons, but from its NGOs. And, as it often happens with such organisations, their influence is two-faced. On the one hand, they supported the pro-Western components of the Ukrainian society and politics, while marginalising the pro-Russian ones; on the other hand, they pushed the Canadian government to do the same and subsequently to assume a staunchly pro-Ukrainian position on the ongoing conflict, while promoting pro-Ukrainian narratives and stances in the main news portals and marginalising any alternative viewpoint about the ongoing conflict and the ways to resolve it.
The role of these organisations has caused many controversies, even within the Canadian society and political world: in September 2023, for instance, the scandal related to the invitation to the Canadian House of Common of Yaroslav Hunka, a former volunteer of the SS Galician Division – staunchly defended by the President of the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada Jurij Klufas, who called Hunka as “a man who fought for his country” – reopened an old debate over a too-lenient postwar asylum policy which allowed several former Nazis, including war criminals, to find refuge in Canada thanks to their anti-Communist credentials. But apart from the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons Anthony Rota, who issued the invitation, the overall consequences of this incident have been limited.
This shows once again the weight of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora in the local politics and its alignment to the priorities of its government. Moreover, its NGOs try not to identify too much with any Canadian political party, and it is not surprising if there were no noticeable changes when the Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was replaced by the Liberal Justin Trudeau in 2015. While Harper had a brief and very tense exchange with Putin during the 2014 Australia G20 Summit, Trudeau appointed Chrystia Freeland, a staunch Euromaidan supporter whose mother has Ukrainian parents and who occasionally self-defined as “Ukrainian”, for high government positions and even as Deputy Prime Minister, a position she held until her resignation in December 2024. From the standpoint of a Canadian politician, after all, appealing to the Ukrainian diaspora has often been a good investment: the political price for appeasing it is rather low, the political gains which could be achieved from its support is potentially great, and its alignment with the priorities of any Canadian government will protect him from most scandals or attacks.
This, nevertheless, is not without limits: the fact that Pierre Poilievre, the Conservatives’ candidate to Premiership at the upcoming general elections, has mostly refrained from commenting Trump’s pro-peace stances, shows that the future alignment of the Ukrainian diaspora with the priorities of the Canadian government cannot be taken for granted. Their NGOs may oppose the peace talks over Ukraine which are currently taking place between Russia and the United States, but Canada is not in the position to keep on feeding the conflict alone if Washington pulls out, and the most likely reaction of any Canadian government to a possible peace deal is just to follow up, regardless of the position of its Ukrainian diaspora.
How influential are diaspora NGOs in shaping Canada’s foreign policy? It would be incorrect to reduce everything to an issue of alignment and cultural closeness: the overall size of diaspora communities, their social and economic status and the ability to preserve themselves as a “diaspora” can often be way more important. On the other hand, it is very hard to underestimate the role of the alignment in understanding why the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora is way more influential than the Russian Canadian ones. Being a Western, Anglo-Saxon country (although with a prominent Francophone component which can be considered a nation distinct from Anglo-Canada), Canada can hardly deviate from the line of the “Collective West” on the issues dividing it from Russia, and there is little doubt that the Ukrainian diaspora is way closer to this narrative than the Russian one.
Giuseppe Cappelluti
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