Canada Prosperity and Parochialism

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The business community, on the other hand, contends that Asians are being unfairly singled out. Asian migrants account for about 20% of immigration to Vancouver; most of the remainder are arrivals from other Canadian provinces. Says Michael Goldberg, executive director of Vancouver's International Financial Center: "Without the Hong Kong people coming, we're not going to create jobs, and if our kids don't work, we won't have to worry about them buying houses." Mayor Gordon Campbell, a former real estate developer, agrees. Says he: "The city is starting to get the critical mass it needs for a more robust economy, and foreign investment is a big part of that."

The debate has left the new immigrants baffled and uneasy. Says Tom Chan, 42, a textile manufacturer and retailer who came to Vancouver from Hong Kong with his family a year and a half ago: "I tell my friends not to overreact, but now our people feel they have to be defensive." To mitigate the criticism, Asian developers are volunteering to advertise available housing units in Vancouver before offering them abroad. In a different goodwill gesture, one Hong Kong family anonymously donated $8.43 million to the University of British Columbia for a new international performing-arts center.

Vancouver's 130,000-strong Chinese community, third largest on the west coast of North America, after Los Angeles and San Francisco, has faced worse troubles in the past, including a near total ban on Chinese immigration from 1923 to 1947. Nonetheless, the latest contretemps rankles. Says Hanson Lau, a radio producer and a Vancouver resident for 23 years: "You don't hear anyone talking about the Canadians who sold their houses to the Hong Kong Chinese at a profit. Sooner or later, people are going to have to face the fact that the city is grown up -- whether they like it or not."