Building Bridges in Vancouver Communication spans cultures - multicultural aspects of business and training in British Columbia

Training & Development, May, 2001 by Haidee E. Allerton

There are 20 or more bridges and even more ethnic entities than that within the 329,202 hectares of Vancouver, British Columbia, so it seems a natural place to build bridges of diversity. That's what many Canadian companies are doing, with the sanction and support of the Canadian government. The main idea is to give Asian and other immigrants flowing into Vancouver the skills and knowledge they need to work in Canadian companies--not just in Vancouver but across all Canada--and to boost the Canadian economy further, which has been changing from resource-based to hightech. The mission is also about sensitizing Canadian companies to the needs of this group referred to as the New Canadians.

You need only to walk the bustling cosmopolitan streets of Vancouver to see diversity day to day: Many Asian faces, towering totems populating the parks, Rodeo Drive chi-chi shops, grand art museums, historical buildings aside modern ones, Canadian Mountie dolls in the souvenir shops, hip restaurants and bars--the word metropolis comes to mind. But there's no forgetting it's the Pacific Northwest as the clouds scud over Burrard Inlet with its hulking ship containers, log flotillas, and seaplanes taking off nearly every hour.

Vancouver is a cultural collage. Nearly half of the city's 2.3 million people don't speak English as a first language. Since the 1986 World Expo, there has been significant growth in Vancouver's Asian population, mainly from Hong Kong and Taiwan. This flow has contributed greatly to Vancouver's role as Canada's gateway to the Pacific Rim and resulted in strong economic ties with Asia. Asian immigration and trade continue to increase. And there are cultures upon cultures within Asian cultures. How to assimilate these, mostly young, people into the Canadian workforce?

There is no federal minister of education; the provinces operate individually. But the Council of Ministers of Education represents a cohesive approach to delivering needed training to New Canadian workers. In particular, it was decided that online learning is a major key. In Canada, connection costs are low, and the country has a landline connectivity infrastructure second to none, as well as a high rate of in-home PC and Internet use. Between Vancouver and Seattle, there's a direct fiber line called the Seattle Gateway.

Kraig Short--who works for the Industry Canada department of the Service Industries Branch, which is similar to the U.S. Department of Commerce--says his department's mandate includes looking at and looking after growth and capital projects of Canadian companies. The department has been promoting, in particular, online learning for cross-cultural communication, including the development of an online-access tool dubbed Marco Polo, a primer on cross-cultural awareness.

Short notes, "There has been a concentrated push called the Connecting Canadians Agenda to get all Canadians connected, to give all Canadians access to the Internet, to get every school hooked up. Some other countries may have incredible wireless connectivity and have even jumped the landline step, but the content-rich media required for e-learning at this point isn't wireless access protocol." Thus, Canada considers its landline connectivity a big asset in the e-learning arena.

First of many stops: various people who are working in cross-cultural training and software localization in Vancouver. Carol Shaben, of Shaben & Associates, has been involved in developing Marco Polo. The online scenario-based primer shows how communication can fail when, for example, a recent Asian immigrant goes on a job interview at a Canadian firm, or in situations in which people from different cultures are trying to do business.

"Often," says Shaben, "the candidate or counterpart feels the door was shut but doesn't understand why." Marco Polo uses case studies to tell a story about what went wrong. In some cases, people don't even realize that something did go wrong. The failure can work both ways, according to Shaben, as Canadian companies in general aren't especially used to or skilled in presenting to different markets. Short points out that a presentation that works well in Toronto might not fly in the prairie regions. Says Shaben, "Marco Polo won't tell you specifically how to do a presentation to a Chinese audience, for example, but it will tell you that you should be aware of certain things."

Rhonda Margolis, a training and development consultant who specializes in cross-cultural communication and valuing diversity programs, worries that many Canadian companies have only enough money for short workshops. "At least you hope you plant some seeds, but you don't always know in the moment.

Mackie Chase, who began her career as a marine biologist and is now director of the Centre for Intercultural Communication, University of British Columbia, focuses on skills transfer across languages and cultures. "The center was working with groups from Mainland China to deal with Canadians," says Chase. "That was a wonderful project in that there's a network of people across Canada and within China trying to make that adjustment, as well as trying to figure out that communication process and an efficient transfer of skills across languages. The faculty of these programs focused on where people's thinking patterns come from and how to integrate new approaches. In a lot of those projects, people moved to different parts of Canada, but many of the students have taken advantage of online support systems to follow up."