Ideal partnership or marriage of convenience? Canada’s ambivalent relationship with the International Organization for Migration

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between Canada, one of the world’s leading immigration countries and a country that often serves as an international ‘poster child’ for well managed migration, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental organisation that provides migration-related services for Canada and many other countries. Despite growing awareness about the role of the IOM in migration politics, a research gap remains regarding how states cogitate and evaluate their partnership with the IOM. This article draws on publicly available government evaluations, conducted by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, which speak to the strongly inter-dependent, but also highly ambivalent reality of collaboration between Canada and the IOM. In exploring and discussing the nature of this relationship, the article also speaks to the particularities of ‘migration management’ and the larger transformations in global migration governance reflected in Canada’s partnership with the IOM.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• International Organization for Migration
• migration governance
• intergovernmental organisations
• migration management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Martin Geiger is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa (Canada). Correspondence to: Dr. Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Department of Political Science, D696 Loeb, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1 The other states were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey and the U.S. (Elie 2011).

2 Another example for regular evaluations of the IOM (in a however much more limited form than in Canada) are the United Kingdom's (UK) ‘Multilateral Aid Reviews’ (e.g., UK 2013).

3 CIC in 2015 was renamed Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

4 In 2015 renamed in Global Affairs Canada (GAC).