Welcome to a tale of unintended consequences.
When he came to Canada from Hong Kong four decades ago, Tung Tat-Shing adopted a “nickname” for familiarity and convenience. We have long known him as Ken Tung, the president of the non-profit Civic Education Society, a radio host, and former chair of the valued SUCCESS immigration organization.
And when he came to Canada three decades ago from Hong Kong, Chiu Kam-Wing also adopted a North American nickname. We have long known him as Kenny Chiu, a former Richmond school trustee and federal Conservative candidate.
Tung and Chiu are among the tens of thousands locally who have used these names for years – they created businesses, arranged their finances and built their careers into prominence under these names. They share this common naming practice with two other local notable immigrants in public life: NDP MLAs Jinny Sims of Surrey-Panorama and George Chow of Vancouver-Fraserview.
Over the years their various government identification cards and documents formally included the English name, often both their given and adopted names, sometimes on either side or below one another. It seems eminently wise, even courteous, in a setting that might misunderstand or mispronounce names to develop familiar, accessible ones. But now they and others are being told by the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia (ICBC) they may not use these combined or dual names on their all-encompassing BC Services Card. They must either change their names legally to reflect their nicknames or revert to birth names they might not have used for decades.
It seems as far away from the Welcome Wagon as one might imagine – and ironic considering Tung’s work to integrate newcomers and Chiu’s work to serve the public. People who have helped countless people establish identities in Canada now face a loss of their own.
The policy change is no small nuisance – cumbersome and costly in many cases. People who established bank accounts in their nicknames now have to often prove their identities when their IDs revert to their birth names. They might lose their histories – Chiu’s voting record as a trustee, for instance – and face the challenge of hauling new documentation from place to place to update the records. They also face a loss of services, including health, if they don’t address the situation.
And a legal name change? Well, it’s hardly a red-tape-free zone: if you’re lucky (and that’s a stretch of the word), it involves a notary or lawyer’s visit and a trip to the police station for a criminal record check and fingerprinting before you get back to ICBC with the documents. Then you wait.
The impact is most profound on those of Asian and eastern European descent. Open-line Chinese-language radio shows have been hearing about tedious and tiring ordeals of either retaining or reverting.
Not everyone has the luxury of taking time from work to preserve a name and not everyone figures out the system, with weeks to go before the March 1 deadline to convert your CareCard into the BC Services Card.
It is, as Chiu puts it, a “bureaucratic hellhole.”
As Tung points out, people still know him as Ken or Kenneth – it’s just that the government doesn’t. He and Chiu don’t argue about the policy to standardize ID, but they take issue with how it’s happening.
“I think the policy is good,” Tung says, “but the implementation is terrible.” At the very least, he says, a streamlined method to update would have helped.
With any change of policy, it is important to ask what problem it is trying to solve. Centralizing and standardizing are great in principle, but the problem in collapsing our various provincial IDs has proven to be how to get from here to there.
To be fair, ICBC didn’t create the policy. It’s merely implementing it. And it’s clear that in this era of data, an alias might be unhelpful in efficient delivery of services.
It seems, though, that someone might have foreseen that making welcomed people feel unwelcomed is hardly British Columbian.•
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president of Glacier Media.
