Earlier this year, Prime Minister Mark Carney became the first sitting Canadian Prime Minister to visit Qatar. Alongside agreements on trade, investment, artificial intelligence, defence, and aerospace, with a Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement expected this summer, he also launched the Qatar Canada 2026 Year of Culture.
That sequence was no coincidence. It reflected a recognition that, today, economy and culture are inseparable.
During the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 ™, millions watched Qatar, a small Gulf nation, host one of the largest global gatherings in modern history. Much of the international conversation focused on scale and complexity of the undertaking. Yet many visitors encountered something more personal once they arrived in Doha: the realization that societies are always more nuanced, layered, and human up close than they appear from afar.
That experience matters far beyond sport.
Globalisation has connected economies faster than it has connected people. Nations trade, invest, and communicate constantly, while public understanding across cultures often remains shallow and shaped more by algorithms than lived experience.
For Qatar, Canada is a particularly important partner because it understands something essential about modern identity. As multicultural societies shaped by global communities, both Canada and Qatar understand that identity is strengthened through exchange. Both countries also recognize the growing role that culture and the creative industries play in economic development, innovation, and international engagement.
That is the spirit of the Qatar Canada Year of Culture.
The Qatar Canada 2026 Year of Culture will bring artists, students, designers, and athletes together across Toronto, Montreal, and other cities in Canada through exhibitions, youth-led debates, creative-industry collaborations, public art, and literary programming. Designers supported by Qatar's creative hub M7 will present collections at Fashion Art Toronto while meeting Canadian buyers, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs. Calligraffiti artist Fatima Al-Sharshani will join Montreal's MURAL Festival, bringing Arabic visual language into one of North America's most visible public-art spaces.
Then Doha Debates will host a youth-led Town Hall in Toronto on loyalty and identity in global football, timely as Canada co-hosts the FIFA World Cup 2026™ for the first time. The photography exhibition Under One Sky will revisit Qatar 2022 through scenes of ordinary human experience, reminding us that sport is ultimately about people.
The foundations are already deeper than many realize. More than 10,000 Canadians live in Qatar today, contributing to education, healthcare, engineering, aviation, finance, and sport. Canadian universities have helped shape Qatar's development over two decades, while generations of Canadians have built careers and families in Doha.
These are not abstractions. They are the human and economic threads that make a strategic partnership real.
The Years of Culture initiative, launched in 2012, was created in this spirit: sustained encounters between societies that might otherwise know one another only superficially. At a time when meaningful dialogue feels harder to sustain, it reflects a belief that shared cultural experience remains one of the most effective ways to build long-term understanding and, with it, the conditions for cooperation.
Canada has long understood that openness to the world is not just a value, but a competitive advantage. As it continues to strengthen partnerships around the world, cultural engagement should be seen not as an accompaniment to diplomacy, but as one of its foundations. The Qatar Canada Year of Culture offers one example of what that can look like in practice. Tariq Ali Faraj Al-Ansari is Qatar's ambassador to Canada. He previously served as the ambassador to Egypt, and a representative to the League of Arab States. Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com Opinions expressed in this video article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff, or the author's employer.