Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
players entered the picture. Primed by Expo 86, the series of trade missions,
and pre-existing networks - remember the remark by the 1985 trade mis-
sion that 'Vancouver is so well-known in Hong Kong' (City of Vancouver
1985) - British Columbia entered the information field of corporate and
private investors in Asia. Japanese sources were a significant contributor in
the late 1980s until the bursting of its bubble economy in the early 1990s.
Foreign direct investment to Canada from Japanese sources peaked at over
$300 million in 1989 and favoured real estate, with a strong focus in leisure
and tourism (Edgington 1994, 1996). Geographically there was extreme
concentration, with almost 60 percent of medium- or large-scale projects
located in Vancouver or the nearby ski resort of Whistler. Tourist move-
ments from Japan to Canada more than tripled in the last half of the 1980s,
and investment flows to the Japanese visitor circuit in British Columbia
aimed to develop vertical integration of tourist activities with Japanese own-
ership of hotels, resorts and golf courses favoured by co-nationals. The per-
ception of leisure as a principal characteristic of British Columbia in general
and Vancouver in particular is telling, and anticipated a broader East Asian
view of the meaning of Canada's West Coast.
While Japanese capital flows were decimated as its bubble economy
imploded, significant foreign direct investment was sustained from Hong
Kong and Taiwan, which had been gathering momentum during the 1980s
(Li 1993).
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Much journalistic ink has been poured trying to estimate the full
scale of capital movements, flows that attracted global hyperbole in the most
intense years of activity from about 1988 to the mid 1990s (Cannon 1989;
Fennell and Demont 1989; Gutstein 1990). While the full magnitude of
money transfers is not knowable - not least because with tax implications
many were conducted discreetly - they certainly amounted to several billion
dollars annually from Hong Kong alone during the peak years (Mitchell
2004); the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce estimated the inward flow
from Hong Kong to Canada to be between $2 and $4 billion a year in the
early 1990s (Symonds et al. 1991). Very large sums also were transmitted
from Taiwan after the relaxation of overseas exchange controls in 1987, releas-
ing a huge pent-up flow of personal savings that were running at the remark-
able level of 40 percent of gross national product (Bradbury 1989). A senior
banker in Vancouver told me in the early 1990s, 'The banks have so much
Asian money coming in, they don't know what to do with it.' In mid-decade a
second senior Vancouver banker confided that US$100 million had entered
his bank via a Taiwanese branch in a single month, following provocative
Chinese naval exercises off the coast of Taiwan. The same year a feature in the
Taiwanese-oriented newspaper,
World Journal
, announced, 'Taiwan's top ten
moguls have already settled down in Vancouver and started their investment.'
A representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Vancouver
added, 'Taiwanese immigrants are usually so rich they do not have to rush to
