Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 30th, 2012

[Jason Kee]

Certainly. Our fundamental view is that there are a lot of interdependencies and interrelations between disparate elements that come into play with the digital economy strategy. It was going to be a long and difficult process. Also, we are keen to see the strategy. That being said, I would rather the government take the time to do it right than to hurry something out the door just to address criticism that it hasn't been fast enough.

In our view there were different elements. One was the issue of access to capital. That includes SR and ED credits. That includes an IDM credit. That includes direct funding options like the Canada Media Fund. There are issues of access to talent in terms of immigration challenges, in terms of long-term talent development. There are issues of broadband access and making sure that we deploy broadband, because broadband is the future of our industry. We have to have broadband to access customers.

There are issues of smart regulation to make sure that any time we decide to regulate in any area that is going to affect our industry, which is nascent and in its early stages of development, that we think through the possible permutations of those kinds of interventions so we don't suffer from unnecessary or unintended effects.

Those were the range of issues that we covered in our digital economy strategy. We largely updated some of those recommendations in the packages that we provided, and it pretty much covered the field. But it's a pretty wide area of issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you, Mr. Cash.

Mr. Gill.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank our witnesses for taking the time to be here with us to share some of the real success stories. It's great to hear some of these numbers—16,000 employees in 350 companies—and Canada being the third largest and first on a per capita basis.

I'm going to throw something out there and maybe each of you can give us your input on what you think and why. I'm just asking for your thoughts in terms of why you feel Canada has such a strong standing on the world stage on this? What gives Canada such a competitive advantage?

[Carole Deniger]

It will be rapid because I'm sure everybody has something to say. The position we have now is a given, unless we go back and take away everything. We've been there, especially in Quebec, for over 20 years.

I have to say that was the vision of economic development of the Prime Minister and the finance minister at the time. That was an extremely aggressive and risky move at the time but it paid off drastically. Quebec is more than 50% of the Canadian industry.

As somebody mentioned before, the whole west coast was a bit different. It was again the dollar value and things like that.

The fact is that with that much maturity and with the link with other industries—we have film and animation, the National Film Board, and the IT industry—all this nourishes the whole ecosystem. It's a given now, whatever the reasons, because there are plenty.

The issue is how we maintain and capitalize on that. How do we value that?

The whole multicultural aspect, I think, is a very interesting aspect. In Montreal we're proud we attract that. We understand that we don't want to take jobs away from Canadians, but it is something that's amazing to be able to attract people to work in Canadian companies in those fields.

[Stéphane D'Astous]

I will add to Carole's comments. Maybe 10 to 20 years ago there was a brain drain. People from Canada were going south, or in whatever direction out of Canada, sometimes because of the lack of important projects in their fields. What I can say is that I'm really proud that my small company is able to attract these people, who left 10 years ago, back to Canada, because we have the most interesting projects in our domain. That is the brain drain in reverse.

I tried to sum up in one phrase daily life in a video game industry studio. It's like a high-speed train collision between art and tech. There's no other industry that can say they have these two elements. How do you manage this energy? I think Canada, in particular, Montreal, the west coast, and Ontario have a certain ability to manage these two great forces.

[Jason Kee]

Our industry has actually always been a global one. We have never looked to our domestic marketplace as our sole market. We would not survive in this industry, because we aren't large enough. Canada is actually 2% to 3% of the global market. As a result, we've always looked abroad. In fact, this is why the introduction of new online platforms and mobile platforms has actually accelerated. We have tremendous opportunities.

When we already had the talent base here, when we already had the instructions here, when we had government support in the form of provincial tax credits and other funding options, it basically meant that we had an array of circumstances that worked in our favour and that we were able exploit.

To allude to something Carole said, one thing we want to be careful about is resting on our laurels. We're third in the world now. We weren't always third. We won't always necessarily be third if we're not careful. We're in constant competition with the U.K., in particular, which tends to be very tense with us about this. But we have huge development forces in South Korea, China, and a lot of the Asian nations, which have many more emerging industries that are extremely strong. They are very good at exploiting some of the emerging areas that are going to threaten our third place position. We always have to be mindful of making sure that we're adjusting our public policy tools to ensure that we retain that position, if not moving to second maybe or even nudging the U.S. out of first.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Ms. Sitsabaiesan.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our large panel here. I'm going to try to touch on one topic, because I think that's all the time I'll have.

I was reading ESA's temporary foreign worker document. I noticed that your workforce is a big topic. What I keep hearing is that we'd like to hire Canadians, but the talent doesn't exist yet. That seems to be about a lot of the technical people, if I'm correct. The talent doesn't exist yet at the senior levels to create that core team. We heard this last time, as well, from witnesses.

What I've learned from your temporary foreign worker document is that if the talent doesn't exist right now, we need to speed up the process for visa approval, because if we don't invest in the industry and get those leaders for the industry to grow, we can't risk losing this industry and losing that third place standing. We've seen changes to HRSDC and CIC policies that are making it harder. I also hear from Ms. Parker that we need to be making sure that we're hiring Canadians.

My question is for everyone and I would remind everybody that we probably have 30 seconds to 45 seconds each.

What should we be doing to make it easier for companies to hire Canadians? If that Canadian is not available right away, what training or what else can be done to get Canadian workers up to speed quickly? If we don't, then I'd say we should make sure that we're allowing the visa process to go faster so that we can get that good talent into the country.

[Kelly Lynne Ashton]

One of the things we're looking at is seeing where the real problem is and targeting those real areas. For writing, we have talented people here. Let's have intermediate level training to get those people into the video game sector.

[Maureen Parker]

I would add that we need a quid pro quo. Whatever we give, we have to receive back.

[Jason Kee]

In terms of the context of the brief, it's not what I'd call more conventional or traditional core creative occupations where I'm hearing from our member companies this concern comes up. It's not all technical guys. It's not all coders and so forth. They're only 25% or 30% of our overall workforce. There are groups we put into the creative element of our industry who aren't the conventional creative people you would think of from a film and television concept. These are the designers, the level designers. These are the guys who work on the digital arts, who create the art assets, and so forth. That requires a high level of specialized expertise to actually do. It isn't someone who just graduated from school. Those are the kinds of jobs we're talking about.

Again, it's not just a matter of doing a workshop and then they'll be able to fill the jobs. If that were the case, we would happily do it. Every single major company engages in a substantial amount of in-house training based on the individual tools they use for their own individual games, mostly to ensure that the new graduates, or even those who are experienced, are actually qualified to be working on the individual project they happen to be working on.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

I'm going to play devil's advocate for Ms. Parker here. Are we mostly hiring Canadian writers for our games? You are representing the Writers Guild, so I'm going to help them out here. Are we mostly recruiting Canadians to do the writing, and then if they don't have the technical or video game specific writing capacity, are we helping them to develop that?

I see the Quebec team nodding. Is that happening in Ontario and the rest of the country as well?

[Donald Henderson]

In Ontario, it's the larger projects that have professional writers because they're larger, more narratively driven projects, instead of something small that is played on a phone. Ubisoft Toronto is one of our members and they hire locally for writers.

[Maureen Parker]

Sometimes, but it's infrequently; sorry, I'd love it if it were true. We would be talking more often other than just here, so maybe we'll endeavour to talk more.

[Jason Kee]

It's also important to recognize that the kinds of projects that would necessitate bringing in professional writers are a fairly small proportion of the overall games that we're producing collectively. For a small iPhone game, as Don has alluded to, you don't necessarily need a professional writer. Also—

[Maureen Parker]

citizen's arrest 3 [Inaudible—Editor]...you did, and you used an L.A. writer in that one.

[Jason Kee]

In some instances, that individual company will make individual choices and, therefore, will not be eligible for the tax credits for those choices.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you, everybody. We're moving on to the next question, as interesting as that's getting.

Mr. Brown for five minutes.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses.

I had the opportunity this morning to speak to Ms. Parker and Ms. Ashton, and we talked about training. I know we have only a few minutes left, so I'm going to give you a couple of minutes to talk about those things, because I know they're very important to you. In order to have the industry take advantage more often of the talent that we have here, the writers across Canada, tell us how we can tap into them even more than we are today.

[Kelly Lynne Ashton]

What we're looking at are workshops. That is something that can be done for writing. The importance in story-based games comes from plots and character. Screenwriters who have been working on drama series and comedy series, that's what they know, and they've developed a skill base over a career in Canadian television. That's why Ubisoft Toronto hired a drama writer who's been working on The Listener and Republic of Doyle to work on the latest version of Splinter Cell.

If we have that kind of targeted training of experienced, skilled screenwriters across Canada, they can then be part of the talent pool and work on these story-based games. We're talking with Interactive Ontario, and we'd love to talk with Alliance numérique about these kinds of partnerships where we can introduce their members to our members, which is also the other part of the story. They have to know that our people can do the work.

[Rob DePetris]

Can I add my two cents?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Sure, go ahead.

[Rob DePetris]

Or maybe not any sense.

I respect the Writers Guild, but last time I made a video game—now I'm at KPMG—I had a team of 100 people and I had three or four writers—and maybe you guys can fill me in. The majority of people we're talking about here are programmers and artists, and some designers. I appreciate that.

I can tell you that when we made a video game all our writers were Canadian, and we did try to use as many Canadians as possible. Just remember when we make these games, it's not like a film where you make a project, you set up the film, and then the actors go home, and then you come back in. Eidos in Montreal has 500 people. Next year, they're going to be making four new projects and they're going to have 500 people, or maybe they're going to have 700 people. These companies continue on, and they're all Canadians.

Sure, we have to bring in talent. When somebody says that we were there 20 years ago, yes, we were there 20 years ago when the industry was 1,000 people in Montreal. The industry now is 16,000 people. We are a victim of our success. We're growing so fast we have to bring in some talent, but in reality how many people have we trained over the last number of years who are filling those jobs? We're doing phenomenally.

Let's look at the real picture here. This immigration issue is something that people have to deal with and we need to help to keep growing our industry, but it's a small issue.

[Maureen Parker]

I do have to respond in terms of what we do. I understand what you do is different, but you were saying you want to be considered a cultural industry and have—

[Rob DePetris]

I didn't say that.