Bilingualism and Canada’s Future in the Global Economy

September 10, 2009

Thank you for the opportunity to join you today and talk about how bilingualism matters to Canada’s future in the global economy.

In the past, bilingualism was primarily an inward-looking topic.  We talked about how it would help us understand and respect one another, about its role in forging our identity as Canadians.

Today, I see bilingualism more as a platform for looking outward, for making the most of the opportunities created by an increasingly integrated world.

For individuals, bilingualism is a stepping stone toward global citizenship.  For our country, it is an essential element in economic competitiveness.  But in both cases, bilingualism matters not just for its inherent benefits, but because of the role it plays in fostering our multilingual and multicultural society.

Canada has always been a trading nation, but the reality is that international business is no longer the preserve of large companies. Almost every business in the country has some international dimension.

Companies sell to customers abroad and buy from suppliers abroad. They invest in operations in other countries. They seek investors from other countries. They recruit employees in Canada to work in other countries. They recruit employees from other countries to work here.

Now, as always, Canada’s commercial relationships are dominated by our neighbour to the south, the United States.  Granted that Spanish is growing in importance as a second language in many parts of the United States, generally speaking, one language, English, is sufficient to do business in that country.

But the current global economic crisis has reinforced the danger for Canada in relying too heavily on a single export market, no matter how big and convenient.

Post 9/11 security issues already were slowing traffic and increasing costs at the border before the recession hit.  Now slowing demand is being reinforced by increased protectionism, like the Buy American clauses in the U.S. stimulus bills.  And the massive government deficits being racked up by the American government – $180 billion in the month of July alone – guarantee a future of rising U.S. interest rates and a weakening American dollar.

We still will have to do our best to deal with those challenges, but we need to work harder to diversify.  That is why we as a business organization have worked hard in recent years to intensify our relationships with key trade and investment partners.

We have taken CEO missions to both China and India.  With India, we have gone further, working with our counterparts at the Confederation of Indian Industry to draft a proposal for negotiating a comprehensive economic partnership.  We undertook similar efforts in Europe, setting the stage for the broad bilateral negotiations with the European Union that got underway this spring.

What I want to emphasize, though, is that negotiations between countries are no longer primarily about the tariffs on trade in goods.  Tariffs around the world have fallen so far that cutting them is the easy part of a comprehensive negotiation.  What really matters are the issues affecting investment and people – and the latter are especially important.

It is no accident that Quebec Premier Jean Charest emphasized the potential for greater labour mobility when calling for Canada-European Union negotiations.

Across the industrialized world, our populations are aging.  To maintain our growth, we need to attract more people from other countries, and ideally, more people with valuable skills.  And as Canada seeks to diversify its commercial links around the world, language skills are especially valuable.

In this context, Canada’s linguistic and cultural diversity rather than duality is a critical competitive advantage.  Renowned American academic Richard Florida – now living in Toronto – has made important observations about the links between creative and dynamic communities and wealth creation.

In particular, he has noted that a high proportion of immigrants in a community is an important sign of its dynamism. Even more important than the number of immigrants, however, is the diversity of the immigration community.  In other words, what matters most is not having lots of people from somewhere else, but people from many different places.

We had already seen this influence at work more than a decade ago.  In the late 1990s, computer giant IBM decided to consolidate all of its telephone technical support operations for North America into a single location. That required 1,500 people with strong computer science skills, and quite a few cities across the continent had plenty of those.  But Toronto won that competition because it was the only place that had the right people at the right price and who also could do the job in 23 languages.

So language skills matter to investment as well as trade.  Language also is a tool that forges relationships, and the economic impact of personal relationships and networks can sometimes be felt in very subtle ways.

I ran across an intriguing example of this a decade ago.  It involved a French-based multinational company with substantial operations in Canada.  In 1999, it embarked on two major projects in Canada: an $85 million expansion of an operation in Hamilton and a $150 million plant in Edmonton.

They were both carried out within the same division of the French company, one based in Texas. They both were under the direction of the same executive, a Canadian living in Texas. But the project managers came from two different locations, those working in Hamilton from France, and those running Edmonton from Houston.

After the projects had been completed, the company did a detailed comparison and discovered that the Hamilton project had twice as much European content as the Edmonton one.  And the Edmonton project had double the American content of the Hamilton one.

Same French company, same American division, same Canadian executive in charge, but the personal networks of the individuals in charge at the plant level had a huge impact on where purchases were made, on where trade flowed.

So as Canadians think about our economic future, about how we plan to prosper in the global economy, we should understand the role that our bilingual heritage has played in and continues to play in shaping an important competitive advantage.  We should be proud of that and we should make the most of it.

We do well in the world because, through our experience with English-French bilingualism, we learn early an important skill, the ability to bridge divides of language and culture.  Looking forward, however, we need to conscious that bilingualism is a beginning, not an end.