Part 4

Steve: Of course, any society-a free society, a democratic society-does require people to speak up and say what they think, and very often they're defending their particular interest, and as different groups defend their particular interests, out of that, a sort of consensus is achieved. If people don't stand up to defend their interests, then their interests will not be defended. I think a lot of people who are more recent immigrants to Canada-and of course, our language program is directed to a large extent toward those people-often express their dissatisfaction with the inefficiency of Canadian government. In my own case, because I participate in some Chinese talk shows and Chinese forums, and you often hear these complaints, and justifiably so, about the inefficiencies of our government here, despite the high-sounding self-congratulatory statements that come out of our political leaders. In fact, the reality is a lot less satisfactory. So I agree with you, I think people should join. Now, do you think that to some extent, people in these ethnic-minority communities are reluctant to join the CFIB because they don't feel that their language capabilities are as good, or that their voice won't be taken that seriously? What are the obstacles on your mind, in terms of getting more people from these communities to join your organization?

Laura: I think language certainly is one of the obstacles, and I think there is a concern sometimes that perhaps they don't understand fully what it is that we're doing. I think sometimes if they call into the office, the communication difficulties certainly can be a problem. One of the things that we've done is we've done some translation of some of our work into Chinese, and made that available to the Chinese community, particularly on some issues that we felt might affect business owners in that area. You know, we're sort of looking at how do we overcome that challenge, that obstacle, and I don't know that there are easy answers to that question, but it's certainly something that we'd like to make progress on. Steve: You know, in a way, I think what could be an obstacle, the language, is also the opportunity, so that for some of these people-and it's not limited to the Chinese; we have Punjabi speakers, Farsi speakers, a number of different languages-and they of course have their own organizations which operate in their languages, so that I think the benefit of the CFIB is the fact that it operates in English. Therefore, they could, by participating, broaden their range of contacts and perhaps improve their English, which in the long run, in terms of operating a business here in North America, is an advantage to them. I'd like to touch briefly on -you've done a paper here as well on the "Business Barometer," and I think the attitude and the mood in British Columbia is quite positive. Would you like to comment on the sort of business mood here in British Columbia?

Laura: It's actually exciting. We've seen for the last six quarters very positive, very strong optimism. We survey our members and say, "What do you expect in the next twelve months for your business?" and these are people who are in a good position to know-the best position to know-what to expect, and we found that our business barometer actually tracks fairly closely with what happens with real GDP. We've seen sixty-eight percent of our members are now saying they expect a stronger twelve months going forward. That's incredible, and that's compared to a Canadian average of fifty percent, so that's eighteen percentage points higher than the national average. We have thirty-eight percent of our members saying they intend to increase full-time employment, compared to only seven percent saying they're going to decrease it. These are numbers that, in my view, suggest that we're in for-barring any external shocks that we can't foresee right now-that we're in for another good year of growth in BC, and it's exciting. Steve: Maybe I could close out by asking you a bit about your background; where were you before, how does one come to the position that you have now, what is sort of your academic or professional career up until now?

Laura: Well, I have to confess that my background is actually in economics, and so I studied economics at the undergraduate and graduate level, and I always had an interest in public policy, but interest in various applied public policy, rather than writing academic papers. So working for CFIB really satisfies that desire. I've also done some teaching-economics at the British Columbia Institute of Technology-and I worked for some time at a think tank, doing research projects and participating in the public policy debate from that perspective. There's no more satisfying job than representing small business owners.