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 strategic investments: the cultural industries that merge technology and narrative.

The Gulf states are constructing a cultural economy through deliberate government strategy, treating museums, heritage districts, artistic production, and cultural institutions as core pillars of national development. Frameworks such as Saudi Vision 2030, Qatar National Vision 2030, and the UAE’s cultural agenda embed culture into economic diversification and global positioning. These programmes use culture as a vehicle for influence, signalling a shift in how the region understands power, identity, and its place in the world. None of this is incidental. It is central to how these states are shaping their global profile.

Carney’s delegation did not recognize this and no Canadian museum directors, curators, archivists, cultural technologists, or heritage experts were included. Canada also arrived in a region where AI is tied directly to cultural power, yet brought only the technological half of the conversation. The result was a mission that appeared well intentioned but structurally incomplete.

This is not a diplomatic detail. It is evidence that Canada still treats culture as a domestic file rather than a strategic instrument of international engagement. 

The Gulf’s Strategic Clarity

The Gulf states see cultural infrastructure as a long-term geopolitical investment. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah and AlUla projects, and the rapid expansion of cultural districts across the region all reflect a coordinated effort to reposition themselves as global centres of interpretation and knowledge production.

This is not soft power. It is institutional architecture designed to shape narratives about civilisation, identity, and the future. It is also an economic strategy that attracts tourism, research, talent, and diplomatic attention. These states are building cultural systems because they understand that the authority to interpret the world is becoming as consequential as the authority to govern it.

Similarly, Egypt’s Grand Egyptian Museum is another example of this narrative realignment. By consolidating the world’s largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities and presenting them within an Egyptian-controlled interpretive framework, the museum ends decades of reliance on European institutions as arbiters of Egypt’s past. This is cultural sovereignty in practice and a reminder of how quickly the geography of interpretive authority can change.

Canada, by contrast, has not claimed any comparable strategic ground.

Claims of Cultural Sovereignty

I have long argued that cultural sovereignty is the real foundation of national survival. Nations endure not because of borders or resources but because they control the stories that define them. Canada is losing that control. When our narratives are eclipsed by global platforms, our sovereignty begins to erode long before any map ever changes. I spoke just after Canada’s last federal election about the urgency of this matter. Cultural sovereignty means retaining control of our narrative voice and the conditions that allow it to flourish. It means protecting creators and their livelihoods, ensuring that Canadian children see themselves reflected in the culture around them, sustaining journalism rooted in our communities, and giving equal weight to Indigenous, Francophone, and diverse artistic traditions. It is not a call for insularity. It is a defence against becoming invisible in a world where identity is defined by those who tell the stories, not those who fail to.

A Choice About Narrative Relevance

The Gulf and Egypt are building the institutions that will define how the world understands itself in the next century. They are crafting the narratives of civilisation, modernity, and identity that will shape diplomacy, education, and global perception. Canada’s failure to engage the cultural dimension as part of Carney’s visit to the UAE showed, unmistakably, that we have not yet grasped the stakes. 

Indeed, the contest for narrative authority has already begun. Canada can enter it with intention, or watch the future written without us. The simple truth is this: only those who build the cultural infrastructures of meaning will have a voice in the world that comes next. And Canada has the tools. Few nations can match our strengths in Indigenous museology, ethical curation, conservation, and pluralistic interpretation. These are exactly the capacities that matter in an era defined not by soft power theatre, but by narrative power. Yet we continue to treat culture as peripheral to foreign policy, and Carney’s delegation made that painfully clear. While Gulf governments approached the conversation through cultural transformation and the shaping of narrative authority, Canada arrived with a narrow, transactional script. We had no mechanism to deploy our cultural capital internationally, no strategy for engaging regions that are redefining themselves through culture, and no recognition that narrative power now operates as a central arena of geopolitical competition.

The Aga Khan Museum shows exactly what Canada could achieve if it understood culture as strategy. Its exhibition As the Sun Appears from Beyond, developed with the UAE Ministry of Culture and premiered at the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Al Burda Award, functioned as a genuine narrative intervention. Through artist residencies and collaborative curation, it reframed Islamic artistic traditions for a global audience and positioned Toronto as a centre of contemporary Islamic cultural production.

This is the kind of narrative diplomacy that other states cultivate deliberately. It builds intellectual bridges, moves Canadian expertise through international networks, and generates cultural capital with geopolitical weight. Yet Ottawa neither amplified nor integrated this achievement into its engagement with the region.

Canada has the substance. What it lacks is the strategy to make it matter.

The price of this neglect is real. Canada cedes influence in the global rewriting of art history and heritage. It loses diplomatic leverage in regions where cultural partnerships build trust. It wastes the leadership we already hold in Indigenous and ethical museology. It walks past major economic opportunities in cultural and creative sectors that are expanding faster in the Gulf than almost anywhere else.

These are not symbolic losses. They diminish Canada’s relevance.

A Cultural Foreign Policy Fit for the Century

If Canada intends to participate meaningfully in the emerging global order, it must place culture at the centre of its foreign policy. This requires integrating curators, museum directors, archivists, cultural strategists, and Indigenous knowledge keepers into diplomatic delegations; building reciprocal partnerships that share authorship rather than export content; investing in training for digital heritage, conservation, and narrative design; and forming long-term cultural alliances with states constructing the cultural institutions that will shape the next century.

This demands more than rhetoric. It requires action. Canada must also place museum directors, curators, archivists, cultural strategists, and Indigenous knowledge keepers inside its in its embassies and high commissions, particularly in regions building cultural institutions at speed. It must pursue partnerships grounded in shared authorship, not cultural export. It must invest in training for digital heritage, conservation, and narrative design, and elevate Indigenous museology as a Canadian contribution to global ethical practice. And it must build long-term cultural alliances with states that are shaping the world’s next centres of interpretation.

Canadians sometimes mistake the absence of cultural diplomacy for neutrality. In practice, it is a forfeiture of influence. This is not the decorative edge of foreign policy. It is the ground on which power is now fought and won. Culture is no longer soft or symbolic. It is the structure that shapes perception, the narrative that orders the world, and the sovereign force that determines who gets to be heard at all.