November 8, 1996

Hongcouver - Canada's Asianised City

Eric Ellis, Vancouver

With little fuss, Vancouver's population has acquired a huge Asian component as a result of Canada's liberal business migration policy, Eric Ellis reports.

VANCOUVER woke up last weekend to a newspaper headline Pauline Hanson and Australians like her would have found appalling. "English Now A Minority Language In Vancouver," splashed the Vancouver Sun across its front page.

Citing Vancouver's social planning department, the paper said English was now spoken at home by just 43 per cent of residents. Some 32 per cent spoke a Chinese dialect, 5 per cent each spoke Vietnamese and the Punjabi of India's emigrant Sikh community, and 18 per cent spoke "other" languages, mostly Thai, Japanese, the Tagalog of the Philippines and some European languages.

French, eastern Canada's official obsession, was spoken by just 2 per cent.

Thanks to Ottawa's relaxed business immigration policy, for the first time in the 20th Century a fundamentally European city has had its cultural base turn Asian. Yet Anglophone Vancouverites didn't rush from their fish and chip shops into the streets, or to Parliament, to demonstrate.

The leader of the Canadian party that speaks for the Far Right, the Reform Party's Preston Manning, was down in Vancouver's most Chinese of suburbs, Richmond, pressing the flesh; admittedly looking as uncomfortable as John Howard, but there nonetheless.

That evening at a dinner party in upscale West Vancouver, Canadians of European descent were having a quiet grumble over their British Columbian salmon.

"They (Asians) are so noisy and arrogant," said one society matron. "These are not Canadian characteristics." But she also remarked how appalled she was at some anti-Asian graffiti in the downtown area.

Comfortable and prosperous, Vancouver could easily be dismissed as another boring city in a nation and culture stereotyped as dull. But it is not and the reason is the dynamism brought by hundreds of thousands of wealthy Asians, mostly from Hong Kong, who have descended on the city dubbed "Hongcouver" in the last 10 years.

Of the 50,000 emigrants Vancouver accepted last year - a quarter of the Canadian intake - 80 per cent were from Asia, overwhelmingly from Hong Kong.

According to local sociologists, Vancouver's population will double inside 15 years, from two million. Some estimates have it doubling again and again by 2030, mostly as a result of Asian immigration. If it is already 50 per cent Asian, it could become 75 per cent Asian - with the rest Eurasian.

Yet Vancouver doesn't even have a Graeme Campbell, let alone a Pauline Hanson. Up in British Columbia's north, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police recently neutralised a private militia with extremist views. It wasn't Canadian, however, but a ragtag bunch of check-shirted Americans who had been run out of the US.

However, immigration is becoming a political issue and Asian communities are getting defensive. The Reform Party is calling for an end to State-funded multiculturalism.

"We are not against immigration, but we do want it more controlled. We are concerned at the haphazard approach to immigration and that criminals might be slipping in," says Val Meredith, Reform's immigration spokesperson.

"A lot of Canadians are concerned that these first-generation emigrants are not making any effort to assimilate."

Anglophone Vancouverites are closely following debate about a tax proposal that will force all Canadians to declare offshore assets of more than $C100,000 ($105,000), which would clearly ensnare Hong Kongers.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien's Government stresses that it is not aimed at one community, but Asian community leaders see it as aimed directly at new emigrants.

The Asian communities of Vancouver - the Chinese in particular - are much more obvious than in Australian cities. Richmond could be a town in Hong Kong's New Territories - a flat, featureless island near the airport awash with vast Asian shopping malls built by developers like Thomas Fung, whose family is best known in Hong Kong for the Sun Hung Kai financial services group.

Hong Kong's middle class has gathered in Richmond and Coquitlam, both of which now have names which translate into the Cantonese vernacular respectively as "Wealthy Gate" and "Prosperous Forest". The first is particularly appropriate given that Richmond abuts the airport that weekly unloads 102 direct and indirect flights from Hong Kong bearing the so-called "astronauts" and their families seeking post-1997 passports-cum-insurance policies.

Like Sydney, Vancouver is not a big financial hurdle for these people. Homes in Richmond and Coquitlam cost $C150,000-400,000. In pukka British Properties, an old Guinness family estate on the wooded slopes of west Vancouver where the Anglophone elite settle, houses start at $C800,000 and up.

By comparison, a car parking space in Hong Kong recently changed hands for $C200,000. A small two-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong's very middle class Tai Koo Shing - an area Australians and Canadians might recognise as public housing - sells for $C1-1.5 million, which would buy a superb home in British Properties.

Some 80 per cent of the Porsches, BMW's and Rolls-Royces are bought by Asians from Asian dealers. More than 80 per cent of Vancouver's houses above $C1 million have been acquired, and re-modelled, by Asians.

Vancouverites have got used to buying and selling apartments off-the-plan, sight unseen and several times, a very Hong Kong practice. They have got used to the very Hong Kong sight of lines outside property developments.

They have had to accept three-story "monster homes", occupying 80-90 per cent of allotments, so built because Hongkongers want house room and not gardens. They have tolerated, just, Taiwanese chopping down ancient trees because Taiwan is in a typhoon zone and Taiwanese believe that trees kill.

Hong Kong Chinese have re-shaped the business community in a frontier town with an internationally notorious stock exchange. Vancouverites have got used to names like Lee Shau Kee, Li Ka-shing and Stanley Ho and Robert Kuok, probably Hong Kong's four richest men, dominating the business pages.

And they appreciate that the recession that ripped through much of Canada in the early 1990's by-passed Vancouver because of the influx. Local writer Raymond Ng says: "People from Hong Kong are injecting $C3-4 billion into the economy every year."