We are talking to a friend of mine, Russ Brink, who has lived in Vancouver for quite a few years, All my life. Born here, and we were talking about the way in which Vancouver has welcomed immigrants over the years. Russ, you were commenting to me about how the situation today is in some ways different, but in many ways very similar to what happened right after the war.
That's right. We had a large group of immigrants enter Vancouver following the war, mostly displaced from Europe. They did not speak English in most cases, though in many cases they were quite skilled, but it was difficult to use their skills because they didn't have the language. The language, of course, is a very important issue. And another, I think, important point is the strength of the economy. And you were mentioning that right after the war the economy was very strong.
The economy was very strong and we were very short of quite a number of skills. During the war many people kept working beyond retirement years and so there were, for skilled workers, real opportunities. And there was a booming economy right through into the 1950's and so there was lots of work, even for those who were not particularly skilled. Were these people more sort of professional, university-trained people, or were they highly skilled technical people?
We didn't gain a lot of university educated people, but we did get a fair number of technically skilled people: tool and die makers, metal workers, people who had done an apprenticeship and were journeymen at their trades in Europe. How much of an obstacle was the language to these people?
Because we were fairly desperate for people with their skills, they were able to find employment even though they didn't speak the language, in many cases. But to continue they would definitely need to have learned the language and most of them did.
And typically they would have learned the language on their own?
There was some training but in many cases they were learning on the job and usually if they weren't single the family was also trying to learn the language at the same time. There would be some community groups: if you were Dutch there would be a Dutch community that would be trying to help Dutch speakers learn English. The same would be true of Italians, or Ukrainians and so forth. So there was some assistance, but not the massive government assistance that we have today.
How would you contrast that situation right after the war with the situation you see today in Vancouver.
Today we have large groups of people speaking Chinese and large groups of people speaking Punjabi. We wouldn't have any single group that large arriving after the second world war. We would have Dutch and Germans, quite a large number of Italians, some from Eastern Europe. But many languages rather than a certain concentration like we have at the moment on particularly Punjabi and the Chinese dialects.
And at school you mentioned you had perhaps up to 20-25% of young children whose mother tongue is not English.
That's right and, not unlike the present situation, usually both parents were working, though some were at home, but often with large families or looking after other families' children, so that many of the children struggling to learn English with parents who were very busy found themselves sometimes at loose ends. Our schools weren't particularly good at finding them things to do, they didn't know the sports we played, they couldn't participate in drama or the musicals. Some of them did drift into games at that time. The games sort of disappeared as the kids went to work, and became 21 and started to get married. But that was a problem for a time. Children had some difficulty finding a place in Canada.
And today your experience would be that there is far greater concentrations of single language groups in the school system.
That's certainly the case. We had a diversity of languages. I think of the 20 percent of our classmates that didn't speak English as a first language, you probably couldn't have found more than 2 or 3 who spoke the same other language. So what should we be doing today? Obviously it's in the interest of not only the parents but also the children if they came here as young children or teenagers to learn English as quickly as they can. Are we doing the right or are there other things we could do?
Well, I think one of the problems is not just to learn the language, but to become part of the broader community. In too many cases, I think now, they are remaining within their own community which means it's hard to learn English because they may learn it at school but they're not using it in their community. They can go shopping in their own language, they can watch television in their own language and that often means their command of English doesn't develop as quickly as it did for many of those immigrants back when I was of school age. Because they had no other choice, there was really no opportunity to continue to speak their own language. A few exceptions, Italian was spoken widely on Commercial Dr., but most of the young people had to learn English because there was no other language to be spoken.
You know, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a friend who is Italian-Canadian and he went to a school in Burnaby, which was, he said was 90 percent Italian. It may not have been 90 percent, but even at a school like the one he attended, the Italian kids would speak English in the school yard and I think we seem to be getting away from that today where if you have a concentration of certain groups on the school yard, they may speak English in class, but once in the school yard as they're playing then they form their own little groups and speak their own language. I think that's a serious problem. I think in the case of your friend, yes, there may have been a very large number of Italians, but there was an awareness that they couldn't do business in Italian, they couldn't shop in Italian. And so, they had no choice, and they could see that. It's not quite so evident now with large shopping areas, for example you can shop in Punjabi, you can shop in Cantonese and even in Mandarin now. So that the need to learn the language isn't quite as obvious as it was, say, in the 40's and 50's. And, from your working experience, how important is it to be fluent in English?
In this community, this is an English-speaking country and on an English-speaking continent and yes, you can probably survive, but I don't believe you can prosper unless you have a very solid command of English. In your work experience, and I believe you were involved in investment and that kind of thing, did you come across people who you felt were perhaps hampered by their lack of English fluency?
I have encountered a few, but they were usually beginners, that is they had arrived fairly recently. And I found that as they got into business, their English improved quite dramatically. But they were usually people who spoke some English before they got here, they would not be typical immigrants. But they were clearly hampered at the beginning, you needed to spend a little more time understanding what it was they wanted to do and it could be a bit of a struggle, and I think it delayed their progress.
You know it's interesting a lot of the immigrants today are professional immigrants who have university degrees and in many cases even a doctorate, PhD degrees. Also, many of the immigrants, some of the ones who don't have very good English at all, are investors who have brought significant wealth with them. And I think, again, the lack of language ability limits the opportunities for them to participate in the economic life. And I think both those groups could have a tremendous contribution to make to the economy here, but this inability to integrate, to interact with the , call it the "mainstream" community is a big disadvantage. I think it's a disadvantage not only for the investor, because opportunities aren't open to them, but it's also a disadvantage to Canada because these are people who not only have money to invest, but they very well have the kind of useful experience that we need to integrate into our business life. We need to put some new energy into the investment world here in Vancouver and many of these people could give us some of that new energy and new insight and the language becomes a serious barrier to making the most of their money and the opportunity their arrival in Canada presents.
Well yeah, and I think too that the diversity of people that we have in Vancouver and British Columbia really only becomes an advantage if there's some kind of synergy amongst these people of different backgrounds. If in fact people tend to stay separate then we're not gaining that synergy. I think that's true and we're a trading province. Most of our income comes from trading goods in and out, and we need to open new markets, and many of these people who have come from foreign countries can help us open those markets, but they need to have a command of English so that we can talk to them and they can talk to their homelands.
Are there, in your professional experience, did you come across different groups of sort of, venture capitalists or angel capitalists or different groups that are looking at different opportunities? Are there such groups here, networking groups or clubs or things of that nature?
Very definitely. There are several very important ones. Many of them were quite successful with dot coms and before dot coms: successful with other British Columbia businesses. But very few of them are based on a language other than English and so they have difficulty doing business where English isn't the common language. But there is a community there that should have an interest in connecting with, whether it be the skilled immigrants, perhaps they're not the tool and die makers of the post-war period, but these are graduates of some of the leading schools whether it be in India, or China, or Eastern Europe, and there are also some investors and then there's an entrepreneurial and a venture capital group here that there should be more interaction taking place. And many of these people have some of the bright ideas of the future that the venture capitalists and the angel capitalists would be happy to finance. But you've got to make the connection and, unfortunately, that connection has to be, in most cases, in English in this community. Well, thank you very much, Russ, for this discussion and hopefully there will be some opportunities to help make some of those connections that would benefit the community at large, as well as the people who are following this program.
