Business | Features
Globalness at work
Canada's firms benefit from the country's multi-cultural diversity, with minimal ethnic friction in the workplace.
- By Bernard Simon, Financial Times
- Published: 00:00 December 18, 2006
As part of its annual charity drive, CAE Industries encourages 3,000 head-office employees in Montreal to bring in a dish that is emblematic of their country of origin. Pasta, curry, enchiladas and chow mein are just a small sample of the offerings. CAE, one of the world's biggest suppliers of flight simulators, has 110 nationalities on its payroll.
Such diversity has proved a boon not only for employees' taste buds, but also for CAE's business. An Indian-born Canadian heads the company's Middle East and Indian division, while a Chinese-Canadian is in charge of operations in China. "It makes life much easier if it's a Hindu speaking to a Hindu," says Nathalie Bourque, a CAE representative.
The company is among a growing number that have come to appreciate the benefits of one of the world's most multicultural societies.
"Our people and our organisation are very reflective of the 'globalness' of our industry", says Klaus Dohring, who heads the Windsor, Ontario-based automotive division of Leggett & Platt, a US conglomerate.
"Having a multitude of ethnically diverse people on staff, that is a real strength of ours", adds Dohring, who was born in Germany.
Some 255,000 immigrants arrived in Canada last year, almost 0.8 per cent of the population, the highest of any industrialised country - the proportion for Australia was about 0.6 per cent.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 18.2 per cent of Canada's 32.8 million inhabitants were born outside the country, slightly less than Australia. The figure for the US is 12.2 per cent, and for the UK only 4.8 per cent.
The leading sources of migrants to Canada in each of the past eight years have been the two countries - China and India - at the top of many western businesses' list of interesting markets.
According to the United Nations Human Development Report in 2003, Toronto has more residents born outside the country than any other city except Miami.
While most of Miami's newcomers are Cubans, Toronto is home to a rainbow of ethnic groups. Bank of Montreal boasts that staff at its main downtown branch speak 10 languages, including Persian, Macedonian, Russian and Arabic.
Francophone
Montreal has absorbed many French-speaking people from Haiti, west Africa and Lebanon. On the other side of the country, only about 40 per cent of children in Vancouver's school system speak English as their first language.
Richard Florida, professor of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia, believes the world's most successful cities are those that become "global talent magnets". In his book The Flight of the Creative Class, he cites Toronto and Vancouver as examples, together with Amsterdam, Auckland and Geneva. "What makes these cities such formidable challengers to US regions," he asserts, "is that many of them, in particular the Canadian cities, not only boast a high immigrant population, but a diverse one too."
David Stewart-Patterson, executive vice-president at the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, an Ottawa-based lobby group, says: "Immigrants by their very decision to pull up roots have demonstrated their willingness to take risks in search of better lives, and they bring this attitude to their new communities." He adds that "Canada's strong flow of immigration from many different countries may provide one of the country's most important competitive advantages in an increasingly global economy".
The advantage takes several forms.
Some companies based outside Canada have spotted a benefit in its relatively skilled multicultural and multilingual workforce.
Global Crossing, the New Jersey-based telecoms operator, has set up a call centre in Montreal to handle conference calls for US companies, including General Motors. The Montreal operators can handle calls in 16 languages, an important factor in Global Crossing's decision to locate the centre north of the border.
Almost two-thirds of Leggett & Platt's technical employees in Windsor and 40 per cent of its sales staff were born outside Canada or have immigrant parents. The company has turned to employees with Indian, Chinese, South Korean and Japanese backgrounds, among others, to spearhead sales and investments in their countries of origin.
Such employees, Dohring says, "are intimately familiar with the country where you are aiming to do business". At the same time, "this person knows you, knows your language, knows your culture."
Similarly, Bombardier, the transport equipment maker, recruited a Chinese national to head its operations in China shortly after he completed a PhD at the University of Montreal's business school in the mid-1990s.
Immigrants have offered one of the few sources of domestic retail growth for Canada's five big banks since the federal government blocked them from combining or taking over each other in the late 1990s. The banks have paid special attention to China, where they vie to sign up customers before they even set foot in Canada.
Seminars
About 1,000 prospective immigrants attended Bank of Montreal seminars in eight Chinese cities last year. Before leaving home, they can open a Canadian bank account, obtain a credit card and be approved for a mortgage.
Bank of Montreal bought the Canadian subsidiary of a Portuguese bank earlier this month with a view to expanding its business in immigrant remittances to family and friends in their countries of origin.
Still, Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business, says Canadian businesses are far from realising the full potential of an ethnically diverse society.
One vexing issue is the difficulties faced by immigrants in gaining recognition for foreign qualifications, especially in the engineering, technical and medical fields.
A Conference Board of Canada survey published last week showed that while most respondents consider diversity a priority, more than 40 per cent do not have plans to make it a reality.
"There is a disconnect between rhetoric and reality in the area of diversity in Canadian organisations," says Prem Benimadhu, the board's vice-president for human resource management.
However, anecdotal evidence suggests that racial and ethnic friction is far less prevalent in Canada than in many other countries. Fears have subsided of a backlash against Muslims following the arrest of 17 people on terror-related charges in southern Ontario in June.
Managers at Leggett & Platt say the only time ethnic passions have run high in their office was during the football World Cup.
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