Good afternoon; thank you for inviting us to this meeting.
I will give my presentation in English, but feel free to ask me questions either in English or French.
Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
I'm Namir Anani, president and CEO of the Information and Communications Technology Council. We are the leader in labour market intelligence, workforce solutions, and policy development for the information and communications technology sector. With me is Sandra Saric, the director of talent initiatives.
Despite the challenging global economic environment, the information and communications technology sector in Canada remains resilient in its ability to create jobs and economic growth. It's a sector that now spans multiple facets of our daily lives, including work, business, learning, leisure, and health.
ICTC's own 2011 labour market intelligence report points to a jobless rate of 3% for ICT workers, which is significantly below Canada's average unemployment rate of 7.5%. The ICT sector boasts a contribution to GDP of approximately 5%, which is equivalent to approximately $61.3 billion annually. However, this value to the Canadian economy is much greater when you factor in those ICT workers in other sectors of the economy, such as finance, health, manufacturing, and public administration.
While traditional industries remain an important focus of the economy—oil and gas, mining, energy, forestry, and agriculture—the relentless pace of technology and consumer expectations are rapidly shaping the ICT sector. In the next five years, a whole new breed of technologies and related services will dominate the ICT landscape, spanning several key areas, among them the mobile arena, cloud computing, and creative online content. These segments will potentially have the greatest contribution to the economy and will require fast-tracking as part of the digital strategy.
The global mobile industry is dominated by the half-trillion-dollar U.S. business of wireless telephony and has entered a long period of steady single-digit growth that will see increasing emphasis on content, services, and machine-to-machine communications as part of the value chain.
In terms of the creative content and apps world, by the end of 2011 global apps downloads had reached a cumulative total of $30 billion. A recent TechNet report commissioned in the U.S. revealed that the apps economy has created 466,000 jobs in the U.S. since 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced. The impact of mobile apps on the Canadian economy has the potential to be huge and to generate enormous benefits for Canada's mobile industry.
Cloud computing, on the other hand, is also creating new business paradigms in targeted consumer services in the way data is stored and exchanged. According to Network World, “The number of job postings in the cloud computing industry is growing so rapidly that there aren't enough qualified workers available to fill these positions”.
The need for cybersecurity human resources will also continue to grow in Canada as ICT expands in organizations, governments, and personal banking. While there are currently few leaders in this landscape, the above ICT industries will be dominated by the SMEs, the small and medium-sized enterprises, due to the low cost of entry and infrastructure and the limited barriers in this arena.
We estimate that by 2016 approximately 106,000 ICT jobs will need to be filled in Canada, with demand for critical jobs far exceeding the supply. This figure will be further compounded if we account for new and emerging ICT sectors.
Canada is also competing in an increasingly tight labour market with emerging global economies such as those of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—the BRICS countries, as we call them—which are achieving unprecedented economic growth using new energy, telecommunication, and information technologies.
Our ability to prepare tomorrow's workforce and nurture innovative talents in key sectors of the ICT economy will be vital in ensuring Canada's competitive advantage in an increasingly global, connected, and fast-paced environment.
Among the prerequisites for success will be preparing our youth as early as high school for new business paradigms, and accelerating their integration into industry; encouraging all potential human capital resources to take part in ICT, including women, representing more than 51% of the Canadian population, and aboriginal talent, which is Canada's fastest-growing youth demographic; attracting the right global talent with advanced ICT skills to fast-track priority sectors of the ICT economy; and last, enabling enhanced LMI research in emerging industries on a national, provincial, and sectoral level, with better measurement of progress, economic output, and talent.
In conclusion, given the fast ramp-up and increased global competition in these emerging ICT sectors that we have highlighted above, Canada would benefit from establishing a national task force over the next three to five years—made up of select industry leaders and associations, start-ups, academia, and policy-makers—with the aim of nurturing, connecting, and guiding SMEs to establish successful businesses that embrace transformational technological shifts and enable commercialization and economic success of the future.
Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions.