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Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with the Aga Khan on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Bob Rae is a former premier of Ontario, member of Parliament and Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. He is currently teaching and writing on public policy.
There are moments that reveal a nation’s character more clearly than any policy platform or political speech.
One such moment came in the summer of 1972, when Idi Amin decreed the expulsion of Uganda’s entire Asian population, and the fate of thousands of terrified families hung in the balance. Discussions between Aga Khan IV and Pierre Elliott Trudeau – two men who had found in each other a shared vision of pluralism as a civic ideal – and other interlocutors, produced one of Canada’s finest hours.
Some 8,000 Ugandan Asians, including 7,000 Ismailis, arrived in Canada that year, the largest resettlement of non-white, non-Christian refugees in Canadian history to that point. They came with little. What the Ismaili community built tells you everything about the community Canada chose to welcome.
Consider the ledger of those 50 years. The community that arrived with almost nothing produced senators, cabinet ministers, jurists, mayors, and leaders in business, medicine, and the arts. In courtrooms, newsrooms, operating theatres, and legislatures, Ismaili Canadians have shaped this country’s identity at every level. These are not statistical achievements. They are the human return on a bet Canada made on itself in 1972 – and they are the foundation on which conversations between the community’s new leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney were built.
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Aga Khan V shares with Mr. Carney the view that solving the world’s most pressing problems – inequality, displacement, climate, conflict – cannot wait for consensus to form, and that the answer is durable institutions and targeted investment.
Their meeting had the character of a working session, not a ceremony.
The joint declaration they issued last week reflects that shared disposition. On housing, Mr. Carney welcomed Ismaili Imamat investments in multi-generational, not-for-profit housing projects across Canada. A community that arrived as refugees is now helping to house the next generation of Canadians. That is not a symbolic gesture. It is a practical intervention in the most urgent domestic challenge Canada faces, delivered by a community that has always preferred building to waiting.
The international dimensions of the declaration carry equal weight. Through a new Economic Partnership Platform, FinDev Canada and the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development will pool public and private capital to invest in infrastructure, renewable energy, agriculture, and financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa and the Asia Pacific. This is Canada aligning its development finance capacity with one of the world’s most effective and experienced private development networks – an organization that has been doing painstaking, unglamorous, institution-building work in fragile states for decades. The two sides also committed to joint programming in Syria, addressing immediate recovery needs alongside longer-term sustainable development.
At a moment when the international order is under sustained pressure, this kind of concrete coalition between a G7 government and a globally embedded civil institution is exactly what responsible middle-power leadership looks like.
On peace and security, the leaders discussed the evolving situation in the Middle East and underscored the need to prevent further regional escalation, with the Aga Khan emphasizing the toll that continuing tensions are taking on civilians. That these concerns were raised directly and plainly speaks to the nature of the frank exchange between partners who share both values and a commitment to making investments that matter.
The Aga Khan reflected that he believes in the promise of Canada – its values, its principles, and its willingness to act on them even when it is most challenging. The late Aga Khan IV said something similar for decades, and proved it by choosing Ottawa for the Global Centre for Pluralism and Toronto for a museum that has introduced hundreds of thousands of Canadians to 14 centuries of Islamic civilization. The Aga Khan V has arrived to carry that belief forward – not as inherited sentiment, but as active partnership with a new Prime Minister who shares his conviction that complex problems require patient, structural answers.
To signal how seriously Canada takes this renewed partnership, Mr. Carney announced the appointment of a senior diplomat, Ambassador David Lametti, as the next representative of Canada to the Ismaili Imamat – placing this relationship explicitly at the intersection of domestic ambition and international purpose.
That is the right instinct. The Imamat is not a bilateral file. It is a global network with deep roots in Canadian life, and it deserves to be treated accordingly.
Some friendships age into nostalgia. This one is being put on a forward-looking footing by two leaders who understand that in a turbulent world, the most radical thing you can do is build something that lasts.
