I'm not currently having difficulty filling those positions in Vancouver because we've seen such a downturn with our largest companies leaving. We've had a number of major studios depart from the city and move to places with higher tax incentives. When some of those employees haven't wanted to make that change and have wanted to stay in the city, they've become available to work in a studio such as mine, so my experience currently is different from that. Prior to 2008, it was the five times per coffee. I can tell you that in many parts of the country, in Montreal in particular, where those larger studios are doing extremely well, it's very difficult to find people.
Part of the problem is this. I personally work very closely with a number of different universities, and I teach at the Vancouver Film School as well as the Centre for Digital Media, which had the first master's program in digital media studies in Canada. We bring internships and students all the time into our studio, and I personally am very devoted to that, but that's not the same thing as having high-level people. It's very different.
We work, as many studios do, on mentoring the students who are coming into our studio by pairing them with experienced people, but there is competition for those really experienced people. They're very hard to find, and they get scooped up.
I'll give you an example. You cannot find a Flash programmer in Vancouver—can't find them—because San Francisco has hired them all. San Francisco had this huge boom, the Facebook boom. Zynga and Facebook were both hiring like crazy, and all of a sudden there was no one to be found in Vancouver.
The difficulty—and the challenge, I think, for you as legislators—is that it moves so darn quickly. If you had asked this question two years ago, my answer would have been different, and that poses quite a significant challenge, I think.
