Thank you very much.
I apologize for being late, but security is security and you don't shortcut that.
My name is Robert Watson. Forty years ago this month, I graduated from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, when it was still a polytechnical institute. I've been in the business for quite a long time and involved in a couple of industry sectors. I've been in the communications industry for most of my career. However, I had the enjoyment of running a power utility for the Province of Saskatchewan also.
I'm here to represent ITAC, a national organization that represents over 300 members made up of Canadian, Canadian-owned, and foreign-owned companies. They include large-scale companies and companies of all sizes. We are the voice of the ICT sector in Canada.
We are a unique sector in that we contribute over $70 billion to the national GDP in Canada. We generate, directly or indirectly, one million jobs in Canada and invest over $4.8 billion annually in R and D, more than any other private sector in Canada.
ICT is also broadening to encompass more traditional sectors. In fact, every industry sector in Canada has ICT involvement, and it is dramatically changing their sectors.
We would like to thank you for being here today and we want to talk about the highly skilled workers in the TFW program.
My sector faces enormous skills gaps and labour shortages. The ICTC estimates that by 2020 there will be more than 200,000 unfilled jobs in ICT. These are high-paying jobs with an average income of $71,000. These will come from the backbone of our knowledge-based economy.
Canadian colleges and universities produce great students, and ICT companies in Canada predominantly hire these young graduates. My organization is doing its part to help train Canadians to fill these jobs. We presently run two programs that have been incredibly successful. The first is called CareerMash, and it targets high school students. The program inspires students to go into ICT and helps them realize connection points between technology, health, the arts, and other disciplines. CareerMash produces inspired, well-rounded students who are ready to pursue post-secondary training in the ICT sector.
We also run a business technology management program, a BTM program, that targets post-secondary students and provides them with technology and business skills. This program has a placement rate of over 90%, and exists due to the generous contributions of the federal government and the private sector.
ICT companies in Canada are eager to hire locally, and will invest in programs such as BTM to ensure a steady supply of talent. However, despite these efforts, Canada does not produce the talent that we need. This is where we need foreign temporary workers.
To be clear, hiring foreign temporary workers in our industry is more expensive and less convenient than hiring locals, and temporary foreign workers do not take the jobs of local Canadians in our industry. They fulfill crucial gaps that will allow our companies to grow and hire more Canadians. We look to temporary foreign workers predominantly for special projects and training. For example, if there is a malfunction with an advanced 3D printer, there may only be a handful of engineers in the world capable of fixing it.
Another example is IoT, the Internet of Things. There is no 10 years' experience in Internet of Things anywhere in the world right now. If we want to get the expertise in Canada or have the expertise flow out of Canada, there has to be movement of personnel.
They also come from outside to train Canadians for particular projects, and they create new products. The ability to train and mentor, in particular, is important to Canadian ICT companies looking to scale up. They have to scale in order to be part of the worldwide....
Earlier this year one of the founders of BlackBerry, Mike Lazaridis, released a white paper called “Scaling Success: Tackling the Management Gap in Canada’s Technology Sector”. He interviewed over 125 top ICT companies to identify barriers to growth and found the lack of executive- and management-level talent was a major inhibitor to growth. Canada does not have a lot of talent at this level because we don't tend to produce large companies. One of the ways to address this gap and to help Canadian companies to scale up is to bring in foreign talent.