In the 1960s there were less than 1,000 Filipino people in Canada. Now there are more than 500,000 across the country, with 70,000 in Greater Vancouver.
Since the last Census in 2006, the number of Tagalog speakers in B.C. has risen 64 per cent, but it is now easier and more attractive for Filipinos to come to Canada so those numbers shouldn’t be a surprise says UBC professor Aprodicio Laquian.
As an expert on immigration, community and the Filipino experience, Laquian says there are numerous policies from Immigration Canada in place to ease immigration.
First is the points system, second is the Family Reunification Program, and third is the live-in caregivers program.
“Canada is the only country in the world for domestic workers to become landed immigrants and citizens,” said Laquian.
Filipinos living abroad send back an average of $20 billion US a year to their families, said Laquian. “It’s keeping the Filipino economy afloat.”
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The census information shows, Filipino people do not congregate in one area across Metro Vancouver. “They want to integrate, it’s in their nature,” said Laquian.
What could be seen as a dramatic rise in people speaking languages other than the official two languages of Canada should not be alarming to people, says Carla L. Hudson Kam, associate professor, Canada Research Chair in Language Acquisition at UBC.
“If people are worried about English and French disappearing, they have to remember that bilingualism is the norm around the world. Being monolingual is actually quite strange,” she said.
“For many families the worry will be how to make sure that their own heritage languages are passed on, not whether English or French will survive.”
Laquian agrees and feels multiculturalism is a very positive development. “Culturally it makes Canada so rich in many ways,” he said.
“People learn the language, they adjust.”
Kam adds the there could be a challenge for children in schools if another language is spoken predomintely at home, but this should be seen as a positive. “Knowing multiple languages opens up opportunities, economic and cultural. Knowing more is never going to be bad when it comes to languages,” she says. “There’s also a lot of evidence that just being bilingual, even for people who learned one of the languages in childhood through schooling, gives the individual cognitive advantages – it makes you better at dealing with conflicting information, filtering out irrelevant things, things like that.”
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