IT isn’t really fair to ask people if they’re happier living and working with people who are like them … without first telling them how beneficial cultural diversity is. … The flare-up around a unilingual English-speaking president at the helm of Ivanhoe Cambridge, a subsidiary of the Caisse de dépôt et placement [Quebec Deposit and Investment Fund], might not have left such a bitter after-taste all around if the Caisse’s leaders had shown greater awareness of [its] role as incubator of francophone financial savoir-faire and entrepreneurship in the province.

…. 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. … Too often, diversity in the workplace is seen [in Quebec] … 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…. 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….

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 … 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…. 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 … there are only 284 visible-minority officers, or 6.2 per cent, and just 189 ethnic-minority officers, or four per cent. …. 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 globalised 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. — (Jan 5)