Evidence of meeting #42 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was games.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Lank, you talked about the challenge you have with 170 openings at the moment. In what kinds of skills, or in what areas—the big ones—do you see shortages?
General Counsel, Desire2Learn Incorporated
Software development is probably the single biggest one, and project management. It's along those lines. We have openings from executive assistants to senior marketing people, but I would say that software development is the biggest one.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
What do you see as the prospects for development that will lead to having more people in these areas? I don't think you're the only company looking for software developers.
General Counsel, Desire2Learn Incorporated
Well, there's quite a bit of pressure in the K-W area because it is so tech heavy. We really like hiring new graduates, so we go to the local universities to try to get new folks.
Communitech has an initiative to try to bring back people from Silicon Valley and other places. We're part of those approaches, too, but it's difficult.
When there is a shortage, I think we ought to be thankful that there is a shortage. In a perverse kind of way, it shows that our industry is doing well. It shows that Canada is doing well in this industry.
It's a matter of cranking out more students, and—
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
To what degree can this shortage become a restraint on the growth of the industry? I'm thinking of lots of industries that have this challenge. I was talking this morning to some people in the manufacturing industry who are very concerned about the lack of mechanical engineers, for example. Do you have any thoughts on where this is going?
General Counsel, Desire2Learn Incorporated
We are looking at other geographies, such as Newfoundland, for example. One of the reasons we're going there is to try to help on the software side. It absolutely can be a challenge. I don't know what the answer is.
Canada used to have an immigration program called the pilot project for software professionals or something like that, and it no longer has that. That might be helpful to go back to, to see if we could get more immigrants in those areas.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
Mr. Kee, I'm going to offer you the chance to answer the same question, but I also want to ask you how you feel about this idea. We've heard about an intellectual property crime task force. What kinds of benefits do you think that would bring?
Director, Policy and Legal Affairs, Entertainment Software Association of Canada
Certainly on the talent development piece, I'd agree with everything that Ms. Lank has said. This is a huge issue for our industry. We have a major shortage of talent particularly in the intermediate and senior levels. We also hire a lot of junior graduates. I think 77% of our companies anticipate hiring graduates in the next two years. Filling the junior positions isn't a challenge. It's filling the intermediate and senior ones. In the short term we look abroad to try to bring people in through the temporary foreign workers program. I think the program you were referring to may have been the IT workers program.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
It seems kind of counterintuitive in the sense that you have so many young people, whether they're 33 or younger, who are playing games, doing online gaming, etc., who love your industry, so to speak, but who aren't going to become software developers. Am I wrong to think there's no connection between the two?
Director, Policy and Legal Affairs, Entertainment Software Association of Canada
There can be, and this actually comes down to an important point, and it also dovetails with digital literacy. There's a big difference between knowing how to use a computer and knowing how to program.
Director, Policy and Legal Affairs, Entertainment Software Association of Canada
There's a big difference between knowing how to play a game and knowing how to program a game.
Liberal
Geoff Regan Liberal Halifax West, NS
You'd think that the use of the technology would spark more interest in developing it and learning how to do that, right? It doesn't seem to do that.
Director, Policy and Legal Affairs, Entertainment Software Association of Canada
In terms of what you said, at the junior level, certainly we've seen the volume of graduates being produced. In fact, one of the things we're trying to work on with some other associations in the IT field is to also use the games industry as a gateway. It's a good way of luring people in. Everyone constantly complains about STEM jobs and the lack of STEM jobs. In engineering we don't have them. That's because to a lot of young people the stuff is very staid and dry and boring, but video games are cool. If you actually make them understand that video games are STEM jobs, suddenly it becomes more attractive. We're working to try to build that some more.
Certainly, as I think you said, a lot of effort needs to be put into doing that, and into making sure we have long-term sustainable development of our graduates to ensure that the jobs at the senior levels are being filled in five years' time by people who are from here as opposed to from abroad.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative David Sweet
Thank you very much, Mr. Kee and Mr. Regan.
We have the luxury of having a few minutes left, so I'm going to give the opportunity to Ms. Lank and Mr. Kee to make any closing remarks or to say all the things that you maybe didn't have enough time to expand upon. Madam Lank, you began the opening remarks, so I'll go to Mr. Kee for three minutes for some closing remarks if he'd like to wrap up and make any other points.
October 18th, 2012 / 12:45 p.m.
Director, Policy and Legal Affairs, Entertainment Software Association of Canada
Thank you very much.
I think I've largely addressed everything that came up.
Just to follow up on Mr. Regan's second question, in terms of an IP crime task force, that is something we feel would be extremely helpful. As I said, there's an informal working group right now in which we do informal information exchanges with law enforcement. Having something that's more formal, that's more organized, that actually has a broader range of participation from various government departments would be extremely helpful, as would developing educational strategies.
Right now we have the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. It is mandated to educate the Canadian population about IP. It does have some programs in place, but the issue is whether or not those programs are sufficiently robust. Are they actually educating the population and small enterprises in the way they should be? How does that link with IP crime? When people think of patents and wonder if, as a start-up, they should patent something, they're not thinking about the IP crime element. It all interlinks. You can't separate them. To ensure that we're properly educating people about those and about the way all of these issues connect together is critically important.
Director, Policy and Legal Affairs, Entertainment Software Association of Canada
Yes.
Conservative
Director, Policy and Legal Affairs, Entertainment Software Association of Canada
No, I think that's about it. Thanks.
General Counsel, Desire2Learn Incorporated
I would first like to thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. I've never done anything like this before, and I was pretty excited about doing it. Thank you for the invitation, and I thank my company for having designated me as the pinch-hitter for John Baker.
I don't know how you folks do this, but I think the one message is we've got to communicate with our trading partners. We have to communicate with the EU and the United States. For the person who asked me about the Canadian embassy in the U.S., this is something that maybe I should be calling the Canadian embassy and asking what is being done about the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office re-exams and the judicial system. It is not that the Canadian embassy is going to change the U.S. judicial system, but communication is absolutely critical in our case for both the EU and the United States.
The rest of the world is going to become more critically important. We're beginning to scratch the surface in China, and Brazil is a daunting place to do business. We've not yet scratched the surface of the IP regime in Brazil. We're just starting that. All this is very costly. Any help the Canadian embassies in these remote jurisdictions could give would be exceedingly helpful. As I've said, we had a wonderful experience with the Canadian embassy in Colombia. Communicate until we can take over the world up here.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative David Sweet
Thank you very much, Madam Lank. I want to assure you that when we have the opportunity to have people of your expertise as well as Mr. Kee's, we are the ones who feel very honoured and excited to be able to hear your answers to what are sometimes our very formidable questions. On behalf of the committee, thank you very much for taking the time to be here to testify before us.
We don't have any other business, but I would advise members that we do have well-established meetings for next week with a full slate of witnesses.
The meeting is adjourned.