Bad economy = more effort spent on learning other languages

Vancouver vu de la "lookout tower" - Vancouver videt de "lookout tower".

This article here is similar to what one would see around the late 90s and early 21st century in ads looking for teachers to teach English in Japan, that even though the economy there was bad (and is now bad again, along with pretty much everywhere else) that this in fact encouraged people to spend more on retraining themselves, including learning languages. In the city of Vancouver this also seems to be the case:

January 23, 2009 -- There is at least one silver lining in the current dark economic clouds. People are going back to school for retraining and upgrading in record numbers...

"Learning another language has always been more valued in immigrant communities," says Jasper Saggu, head of the Modern Languages Department at International House, Vancouver. "We have always had people who want their children to have the best of both worlds, but what we are seeing now is a real surge in learning other languages."

Enrolment at community colleges and continuing education classes is also booming and finding qualified instructors is a challenge even in a multi-cultural city such as Vancouver.

The article doesn't say which languages, but in Canada this probably means a lot more attention being paid to French as government jobs are pretty safe bets during a recession. I imagine that a lot of the students there are people that already know French to a certain extent and have decided that with a bit of extra training they should be able to get a leg up in trying to get one of these jobs.