All in the family
Whether it’s through shared values or an agenda to tackle shared challenges, the Commonwealth has to work harder to make itself relevant. If it can’t win back the affection of Canadians, it may not live to see its 70 birthday (Sriskandarajah, 2009). As the modern Commonwealth passed its sixtieth anniversary in 2009, the organization’s longstanding, slow-brewing crisis of relevance seems to have come to a boil. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Canadian attitudes—both official and unofficial—toward this venerable organization. This represents a striking reversal of the predominant Canadian disposition through the first 50 years of the modern era, when Canada and Canadians were among the organization’s most consistent supporters politically and financially, and played pivotal roles in both institutional development and in averting organizational crisis or even rupture (e.g., A. Smith, 1981). Moreover, Canadians’ enmeshment in this association has always been multi-dimensional and trans-societal, involving the organization’s dynamic web of non-governmental as well as interstate dimensions (multiple Commonwealths, as explored by Shaw, 2008). The Commonwealth’s vital, historic, transnational or cosmopolitan dimension reflecting a long, though contested, common heritage would seem to place it in the vanguard of contemporary multilateralism, with its growing emphasis on multi-level interaction and sociality. Yet in some respects, the decline, or wasting, of the Commonwealth as a multilateral asset is eminently predictable. For Canada, along with other Commonwealth members, as historic economic and immigration preferences withered, the organization’s importance was increasingly undercut by the growing strength of regional political economies and associations—North and inter-American, European, and Asia-Pacific. For Canada and the 61