Dear Editor,
Last month, I was in a local retail queue. To reduce wait time and improve the customer experience, a customer sales representative (CSR) politely moved down the line to ask a simple question in an effort to divert certain routine transactions to one of the many idle self-serve kiosks.
After asking me, the CSR moved along to the middle-aged customer behind me and asked that customer if the customer was doing a cash transaction.
The customer responded to the CSR’s question in Cantonese Chinese (not Mandarin Chinese).
The CSR said, “I don’t speak Chinese,” and the customer (who understood enough of the question and the CSR’s reply) immediately and crossly dismissed the CSR with a back-handed swipe of her arm (no physical contact) and a verbal derogation.
The CSR had to fetch a Cantonese-speaking employee to determine the nature of the customer’s business that day.
The CSR was a recent immigrant from Vietnam who spoke English well. She was adapting to her adoptive country.
The country we call Canada was built on immigration — immigration in service of Canada, not the other way around.
Inter-cultural exchange and routine commerce requires a common language for cohesion.
The onus is on newcomers to Canada, be they citizens, permanent residents, or neither, to adapt by using one of our official languages while we adopt.
If a Canadian-Born-Chinese (CBC), who reads and writes one of the official languages of Canada, seeks employment here where they grew up, are they to be disadvantaged in a hiring decision because they can’t speak Mandarin, or Cantonese (or neither)?
Will they be driven away from their local family network because they can’t read and write Chinese, or another foreign language.
As Canada, strong and free, turns 150 in 2017, every ordinary Canadian ought to make an effort to seek out and understand the demographic data, to be objective, to expect reciprocity, to seek pragmatic solutions based on data — not ideology or vested interests.
Peter Boldy
Richmond
