It isn’t really fair to ask people if they’re happier living and working with people who are like them rather than with people who are different – without first telling them how beneficial cultural diversity is.
If they don’t know the advantages, they’ll tend to stick with what they know. Working with people whose language and cultural background you share requires less effort. There’s no need to listen carefully to subtexts. There’s a casual assumption that everyone understands everyone else and can get on with the task at hand.
But what if the task is reaching out to new global markets? Or teaching the traumatized children of war refugees? Or melding corporate cultures?
The flare-up around a unilingual English-speaking president at the helm of Ivanhoe Cambridge, a subsidiary of the Caisse de dépôt et placement, might not have left such a bitter after-taste all around if the Caisse’s leaders had shown greater awareness of the Caisse’s role as incubator of francophone financial savoir-faire and entrepreneurship in the province.
Coming to grips with cultural diversity requires an effort on both sides, but it’s an effort that pays extraordinary dividends. Research from around the world shows that companies and economies that have made a commitment to diversity have happier, more productive workforces, are more prosperous, and show greater creativity and flexibility.
Unfortunately, in Quebec, “diversity” seems still to be just another way of saying “non-francophone.” In too many quarters, diversity is perceived as something to be overcome, with newcomers thoroughly integrated into the province’s francophone community to ensure the survival of that community.
When the issue of linguistic or cultural diversity comes up in Quebec, it’s rarely to show how diversity benefits the province’s economy or helps its workforce become more open, tolerant and flexible. Too often, diversity in the workplace is seen instead as a threat to the primacy of French as the language of work. For weeks last year, the province was embroiled in the issue of whether the Caisse de dépôt should continue to employ two senior executives who did not speak French. The previous year’s big Caisse issue – its largest-ever loss of $39.8 billion – didn’t seem to upset people nearly as much, or for as long.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that French-speaking Quebecers scored lower than the national average when they were asked how favourable they are to neighbourhood and workplace diversity. Their answers were part of a recent survey for the Association for Canadian Studies, headed by Montreal historian Jack Jedwab.
Quebecers, more than other Canadians, tend not to work or live in multicultural environments. While the state can’t interfere in people’s choice of where they live, it could make it easier for Quebecers of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to get to know one another in the workplace. How? By hiring more non-francophones.
It has long been a sore point with the province’s anglophones, allophones and visible-minority populations how closed the municipal and provincial civil service are to them if they want to seek employment there. Anglophones – a category that includes both those whose mother tongue is English and allophones whose first of Canada’s two official languages is English – accounted for 11.9 per cent of Quebec’s population in 2006. According to Statistics Canada, that year anglophones held only 2.8 per cent of jobs in the provincial civil service and seven per cent of local, municipal and regional public-service jobs.
In Montreal, visible minorities accounted for 16.5 per cent of the population in 2006. Yet among the city’s nearly 4,600 police officers, according to the police force’s data, there are only 284 visible-minority officers, or 6.2 per cent, and just 189 ethnic-minority officers, or four per cent.
In the laudable mission of increasing this province’s openness to diversity, the workplace is a good place to start – specifically the civil service. Quebec’s public-sector workplace could be transformed to reflect the province’s population – if the political will is there.
The rewards are obvious and immediate: the flexibility, cultural sensitivity and knowledge to thrive in a globalized world, the ability to get along with newcomers, a greater creativity in solving problems wherever they come up. These are qualities any forward-looking society should want to cultivate.