Bermudez estimates that maybe 3 or 4 per cent of Canadian companies are willing to hire a qualified immigrant. Most companies demand two to five years of Canadian work experience and rarely, if ever, ask about international experience, she says. For a professional couple with children, that means scraping by for three to five years before their incomes are even on par with what they made in their home country. “I see a lot of discouragement; you have to be really brave to do it,” says Bermudez. “I know doctors and lawyers working as security guards — it just breaks my heart. I’ve seen people come here and leave a year later.”
In fact, many of the best and brightest new immigrants are leaving in droves. Between 1980 and 2001, some 380,000 Hong Kong immigrants, mostly wealthy business investors and skilled professionals, arrived in Canada. Many came with the express purpose of acquiring a Canadian passport as an insurance policy against the transition from British colony to Chinese rule, but a significant number were also disappointed by the meagre business opportunities, onerous regulations and lack of job prospects they found in Canada. According to a Statistics Canada study of economically active Hong Kong immigrants between the ages of 20 and 45 who arrived since 1991, 40 per cent have either returned home or moved on to a third country, usually the United States. In Hong Kong there are now an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people holding Canadian passports — the largest single source of foreign passports in the territory.
“An inordinate number move on,” says Don DeVoretz, an economist at Simon Fraser University who is tracking the Hong Kong immigrants. “It’s astounding, really.” A number of surveys conducted by DeVoretz and others have found that while many Hong Kong natives may prefer Canada’s more relaxed lifestyle, they largely see the country as a place to retire or send their children to school. They certainly don’t see it as a source of wealth creation. “I would never think of doing business here,” one survey respondent was quoted as saying. “I would like to work in Hong Kong and sleep in Canada,” responded another.116 All in all, the research concludes, Canada largely serves as an “entrepot” for migrants, offering language training, education and a passport before they move on to the rest of the world.
The more recent influx of mainland Chinese are expected to follow the same course. Many who were unable to obtain a visitor’s visa before making the decision to move to Canada now feel duped. They are packing up and moving back. “They knew Canada was a stable country, but they didn’t realize the environment was so bad,” explains Albert Yu, who works with Chinese immigrants in Vancouver. “They can’t get a job, they can’t start a business. If I am Chinese and I come over here to do a mid-level job, I would be disappointed.” DeVoretz and the University of Alberta’s Shiboa Guo, in their poll of Chinese households in Vancouver, found the immigrants “experienced deep dissatisfaction with Canada and planned to move on.” They went on to predict that “both the necessary and sufficient conditions exist for a continued large-scale emigration of post-98 Chinese immigrant arrivals.”117 The predictions may already be coming true; a 2006 study by Statistics Canada found that one in six young, highly educated immigrants leave Canada within a year due to the lack of job prospects.
The disillusionment has become so widespread and, in some cases, so visceral that a number of disaffected immigrants have even launched a website— www.notcanada.com — to document their travails and warn other potential newcomers against the perils of moving to Canada. The growing backlash doesn’t bode well for the country’s reputation or its urgent need to up its annual immigrant quota to 1 per cent of the population by 2010. Canada is the only developed country that actually wants more immigrants than it currently receives — by 2011 it will need to rely on newcomers to supply 100 per cent of its labour force growth— yet some 30 per cent of Canadian immigrants eventually return to their home countries or move on to a third country. “We risk losing our reputation as a tremendously welcoming place,” warns David Pecaut, a partner with the Boston Consulting Group who has spearheaded efforts in Toronto to better integrate immigrants. “We have this great reputation, but if that starts to change it could really hurt us. We absolutely need these folks for the economy’s sake.”
And not only as an important source of labour. As we have seen, immigrants are the driving force behind a disproportionate number of successful Canadian companies. It’s a phenomenon that is not unique to Canada. By one count in the late 1990s, 41 per cent of all Ottawa-based, publicly traded technology companies were headed by immigrants;118 in California’s Silicon Valley, close to a third of dot-coms were launched by Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs. According to Richard Florida, a professor at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, the flow of global talent to the United States is the impetus behind much of the nation’s high-tech supremacy; its leading Internet giants, including Google, Hotmail, Yahoo! and eBay,* were founded by foreigners. In this “creative age,” as Florida calls it, the drive to attract top talent will outstrip competition for jobs, technology and investment and will spell the difference between progress and stagnation.
The high proportion of foreign-born residents in Canada’s largest cities has prompted Florida to put Canada in the winner’s category. On paper, it all adds up quite nicely; but dangling a Canadian passport and the opportunity to learn English in a safe, clean environment is becoming less and less of an incentive to stick around, especially as countries like China and India are making aggressive bids to lure their overseas diasporas back home. As these countries move into a stage of hyperactive wealth creation, they have identified these pools of foreign-trained nationals as a strategic asset, and China is now offering its overseas academics free airfare and accommodation and even building specially dedicated scientific parks for returning researchers. “In China there are a lot of opportunities opening up, while in Canada they are still treated like second-class citizens,” says the University of Saskatchewan’s Li Zong, who’s spent years studying the problem.
Ironically, one of the things that makes these overseas nationals attractive to their native countries is the fact that they’ve had Canadian education and training and exposure to a different way of doing things, and as a result bring a new skill set with them. It allows them to think outside the box and be more innovative — qualities that Canadian companies surely could use. Instead, Canada has helped equip them to create wealth elsewhere. “It may not matter at the individual level, but it does matter for the country as a whole,” explains Kenny Zhang of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. “If we don’t use this advantage wisely and our competitor does, then Canada is not in a good position to compete.”
ALL THE INGREDIENTS FOR A MEAL
Some observers, like John Wiebe, former president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, who have spent years fulminating over the issue have reluctantly concluded that connecting the Canadian mainstream with immigrant communities is “wishful thinking.” He may be right. Or maybe we just need to learn how to recognize the signposts — the ones that point to the maze of bridges that circle and weave all around us but that only a small subculture of transnational migrants, itinerant expats and globally minded companies have figured out how to drive on.
It reminds me of the 1999 motion picture The Matrix, in which a stealthy band of travellers moves between the simulated world and reality using portals. They are usually located in the most unassuming, ordinary places — a public telephone booth, an abandoned apartment, a back alley. In Toronto, the portals connecting Canada and China are so obvious they are almost invisible to the naked eye: the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), the University of Toronto and the teeming alleyways of the city’s Chinatown, to name just three. It’s a matter of recognizing their transportive qualities and then punching in the right coordinates.
Spadina Avenue is always a hive of activity, crowded with merchants hawking cabbage and designer knock-offs from their curbside stores. But the real deals in Chinatown are being made under the radar, with ever
yone who can hopping on board the Chinese gravy train and heading back to pan for their nugget of gold. Retired teachers are building massive, 85,000-square-foot restaurants in Shanghai, former insurance salesmen are managing the expansion of North American hotel chains on the mainland and Communist Party secretary-generals are flying into Toronto incognito to seal $100 million investment deals. “When I go to a Chinese banquet, two out of ten people at every table are doing business in China,” says one prominent member of the community. “Businessmen are going over there every single day. It’s the gold rush all over again.”
A few blocks away, the atmosphere on campus at the Rotman School of Management is unabashedly white collar. But don’t be fooled by the excess of blue blazers and carefully cropped hair. Close to half of the students graduating from the mba program in 2007 are from outside Canada and the United States — the largest group coming from India and China. There’s even a Chinese mba students’ association, and many alumni now hold down influential jobs in Canada, the United States and back in China. “In ten years these kids will have this country licked so fast it isn’t even funny,” says a Chinese Canadian businessman. “If I were a Canadian business, I would go meet them, find who the premier students are and get hold of them.”
Moving deeper into the heart of downtown, a century-old mid-rise is easily missed amid the skyscrapers crowded around King and Yonge streets. On the eighth floor, at the end of an empty hallway, is the Canadian headquarters of Hanfeng Evergreen. The sparsely decorated office, with its whitewashed walls and token Canadian and Chinese flags, doesn’t look like much of a gateway, but Hanfeng is one of a growing handful of truly transnational companies that has operations in China and is listed on the tsx.
A combination of the word Han, meaning ancient Chinese heritage, and feng, Chinese for maple, Hanfeng was founded by Yu Xinduo, a former Chinese government official who made his fortune in the jewellery business before immigrating to Canada in the early 1990s. Impressed by the urban greenery in Canadian cities, Yu believed there was a tremendous business opportunity for landscaping in China’s booming centres. He opened a nursery business in his home town of Dalian using Canadian technology and products. In 2003, with the help of capital raised in the Toronto Chinese community, Yu engineered the reverse takeover of a Canadian company, listing Hanfeng on the exchange.
With sales of $40 million in 2005, the company operates four fertilizer plants and has more than three hundred Chinese employees. Hanfeng’s Canadian contingent includes an almost entirely local board of directors and a small but surprisingly multicultural staff. The company’s chief financial officer immigrated to Canadian from Dalian a decade ago. The public-relations rep, though Canadian-born, is half Norwegian and half Japanese, while executive director Kim Oishi, who describes himself as “half Japanese, half Jewish” is from Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
One of only two native English speakers at the company, Oishi communicates with Yu through a translator.
Like many “astronaut” businessmen, Yu spends most of his time in China. But his ties to Canada are strong, not only because of Hanfeng, but because his wife and two children live here. “He wants to have a good reputation in Canada— his family is here,” explains Oishi. “So if Canadians can convince Mr. Yu, or they can find individuals like him, to introduce them to China, it will go a long way. He understands China like the back of his hand.”
Of course, for any of these portals to work, immigrants will also have to do their part to meet the mainstream halfway. On the one hand, that means recognizing the value of the skills they bring and promoting them to Canadian companies that may not know what to look for. It also means making more of an effort to integrate. Yu is a case in point: after a decade in Canada, he still doesn’t speak English. “The weak point of the Chinese community is they don’t make enough of an effort to integrate, and they’re not as patient because it’s not as easy to make money,” says Ken Kwan. “Mindset is very important. In Canada you have to keep on trying.”
Ultimately, however, capitalizing on Canada’s “hidden” advantage will depend on first recognizing that we fail to see it. Like a picture concealed within a holograph, it’s only by making a conscious effort to adjust our focus that the jumble of seemingly random patterns crystallize into a conceptual whole. And the more often we do it, the more quickly and easily the picture emerges. In the same way, says David Fung, adopting a different perspective can only come by learning to respect different cultures and ways of being. The key, he says, is exposure. Twenty years ago Fung and his wife made the conscious decision not to attend a Chinese church, and instead opted to worship at an Anglican church in the mostly white enclave of West Vancouver. They were the only ethnic Chinese couple there, and people were astonished at first, he says, but now, he and his wife are just part of the congregation, like everyone else.
“To make use of this hidden resource, I think a lack of cultural respect and understanding are probably the biggest stumbling blocks. Both communities may need to take a step towards each other to make the connection,” says Fung. “I believe Canada really has this tremendous opportunity. Whether we, as individuals, take advantage of it will require more exposure, education, discussion, and more debates within our communities. But we have all the elements. It’s like a chef in the kitchen. Do we put these ingredients together to make a meal, or do they stay separate forever? It’s up to us.”
* Toronto is the second-most-multicultural city in the world after Miami.
* This cadre of foreign-born Internet entrepreneurs includes Canadian Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay.
9 THE MEXICAN LUNCH , OR A MUG’S GAME ?
“ In one thing people are the same—find out what it is they want and what they need. Once you scratch off the veneer, we are all the same. If you realize that, there are great opportunities to be had.”
CHARLIE FISCHER, CEO, NEXEN
IT WAS THE EARLY 1990S, the Alberta economy was in the doldrums and a local consulting firm was casting around for new business opportunities.*
The U.S. government had decided to backstop Latin American debt with Brady Bonds, and momentum was building for a North American free-trade agreement. It seemed like only a matter of time before business would begin migrating to Mexico. The Alberta firm figured it could get a head start on the competition by opening an office in Mexico City to represent companies hoping to expand into the low-cost, emerging market. Little did it know that this seemingly savvy decision would mark the beginning of a harrowing, decade-long odyssey fraught with embezzlement schemes, blackmail and corruption.
Things seemed to go awry almost from the get go. A senior member with the firm flew down to Mexico City to launch the business. His first stop was the Canadian embassy, which referred him to a local adviser who could provide him with on-the-ground knowledge of the market. He paid the adviser, a former Mexican chief of police armed with a letter of recommendation from the embassy, and flew back to Canada. When several months passed and almost no work had been done, the consultant returned to Mexico City to confront his wayward man-on-the-ground.
The two met, but no sooner had he begun asking questions than the excop pulled out a gun and placed it on the table between them. Needless to say, the meeting went nowhere and the money paid to the cop-cum-adviser was never recouped.
And that was just for starters. Undaunted, the firm forged ahead, opening up a rep office, only for its Mexican bookkeeper to pilfer fifty thousand dollars from the company by filing false account claims in cahoots with a local bank official. Then a three-way joint venture to build a multi-million-dollar industrial plant in northern Mexico turned sour when one of the partners, a leading Mexican engineering and construction company, went bankrupt. The financially insolvent firm was in breach of the development agreement but refused to exit the project unless it was bought out of the venture. The Mexican firm was quite practised in the art of manipulating the Mexican judicial system, and the Canadian consultancy, despite a co
stly legal battle, was unable to enforce its contract in the Mexican courts. “The judicial system was just a circus,” says an executive with the firm. “We spent more money than we ever should have. Every day a thousand bucks was going out the door.” Between the lengthy delays and legal shenanigans, the project eventually fizzled.
It sounds almost too absurd to believe, but in the midst of the chaos surrounding the Mexican construction company’s dissolution, its in-house legal counsel raided the company files and stole the project’s promissory notes. He then attempted to blackmail the Canadian consultancy, demanding fifty thousand dollars for their safe return. The Canadians refused to pay, and eventually the lawyer slunk off.
While the consultancy did have some success in Mexico, by the late 1990s the Alberta economy was rebounding. Senior management began to wonder whether its Mexican operation was worth all the headache when a nasty labour dispute with its Mexico City office confirmed their suspicions. A couple of senior employees had quit to set up a competitive business, then turned around and sued the Canadians for unjust dismissal. Ensnared in Mexico’s archaic labour laws and dragged, yet again, through the country’s capricious court system, the consultancy spent tens of thousands of dollars vainly trying to defend itself against a less than impartial justice system. “It’s like a spider’s web,” says a member with the firm. “It seems like they see you coming and say, ‘Here comes another sucker.’”
After everything the company’s been through, it says it can’t, in good conscience, advise its clients to invest in such a corruption-riddled country. Besides, between the legal charades, wasted time and management hassles, it’s not worth all the anguish and effort when there’s easy money to be made right here at home. Many would agree. As far as Dick Haskayne is concerned, going international is a “mug’s game.” Says the chairman of TransCanada PipeLines, “‘International’ sounds romantic and glamorous, but it’s very, very expensive, and people have no idea about the cost of operating internationally. Unless it’s highly profitable, it’s a disaster.”
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