Industry Committee on March 5th, 2014

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

I just mean a brand new company that has never filed taxes before. What other measures can help out beyond SR and ED?

[Julien Lavoie]

I think you've heard some other witnesses talk about marketing as a big hurdle for the industry, especially on the smaller-size games where they're fighting to break through the noise and be noticed. Help on that front could be helpful for some of the companies.

But even some small companies need access to the right talent. Oftentimes these teams are cobbled together, but if they had a reliable system to bring people onto the world stage, if they had better access to workers from all over the world, they could compete with the world more quickly.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

That's great.

We had ACTRA here on Monday and even they spoke about performance arts and the development of talent. Canada does have a great talent pool in performance arts, but they need specialized training in some cases to work in a motion capture studio because of the different demands. This goes back to training and labour.

Of course we have 16,500 employees there now. We have difficulty with some of the talent levels, but if we want to continue to grow and continue to be a world leader we have to be graduating more students and having more people getting the kind of training they need.

What could the federal government help do on that side of things to actually improve the access to education and training that Canadians will need?

[Julien Lavoie]

When we're talking about skills, that's not an easy answer. But it really needs to start a lot earlier than it is now.

We hear a lot about STEM education—science, technology, engineering, and math—which is something that can't just be tacked on at the university level. If we are to build a digital economy in the proper sense of the word, we need people to get into these university-level programs with training in the advanced high school maths and sciences they will need in order to be competitive in the job market in the future. It's a longer-term problem than just post-secondary education programs or even at the high school level. We really need to start kids coding basic things at the primary level so they are computer literate and media literate at a much earlier age.

I know that's not something that the federal government necessarily has a role to play in—

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Mr. Lavoie, sorry, we're way over time so I just need to cut you off there. Thank you.

Mr. Lake.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

If you have anything to add, you can continue with my time.

[Julien Lavoie]

That's okay. I think I mostly completed my point.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

You're good? Okay.

Continuing with my line of questioning from earlier, talking about post-secondary institutions and the types of programs that students might want to look at to play in this industry, I guess, are there institutions particularly successful in Canada that you could highlight for us? Are there institutions that have programs or approaches in this industry that would be particularly effective?

[Jayson Hilchie]

Sheridan College is known the world over for its 3-D animation department. You could probably go to any video game studio in this part of the world and find a graduate from Sheridan College. So on the artist side of things, it's definitely been around for a while. You can highlight a number of video game programs that do coding, all the way from Acadia University in Nova Scotia—UPEI has a video-game-specific program as well—out to the Centre for Digital Media at the Great Northern Way Campus in British Columbia, which is becoming well known with their digital media master's program. There are a number of schools. Even Waterloo, which is not necessarily known for video games, produces world-renowned software engineers who are well suited for our industry.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

You talked about the different aspects or different roads that students could go down to get that education, depending on what their interest is, whether they're artistic or more on the technical side or even the business side, I guess. Where is the biggest need in terms of employees? Or is it across the board?

[Jayson Hilchie]

There's a big need in intermediate- to senior-level employees across the board, but I think computer programmers are always people that our industry is competing for, for a couple of reasons.

One, it's because the dot-com bust in 2000-2001 considerably shrunk enrolments in most computer science programs in Canada, where this industry was getting up to a point where CS programs at universities were building new buildings for themselves and getting to a point where this was the next thing. After the bust, the enrolment in a lot of these programs just went nowhere. That created a bit of a gap over the last half-decade to a decade.

But in addition we're also competing globally for these people. All you have to do is look as far as Waterloo in the BlackBerry situation, and Apple, and Google, and some of these companies setting up career fairs for these people who have been laid off. There is a global talent competition for these types of people.

I often talk to colleagues who work in the San Francisco Bay area, in Silicon Valley. Their comments are, “We can't find a computer programmer, and if we could, we can't get them for less than $125,000 out of school”, because Apple, Google, Facebook, HP, and all these leading companies have every computer programming graduate basically within a 100-mile radius already hired before they come out of school.

So there's a global competition for software engineers, but also it's that bit of a gap after the bust. I would say those two have really contributed to the challenge that we have with that particular skill set.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

When you say intermediate or senior positions, are you talking about in terms of experience, or are you talking more in terms of the education level?

[Jayson Hilchie]

I'm talking about experience. This is something that we wanted to make sure we clarified today as well, because we did listen to the previous committees. There is a sincere difference between skills and experience. They may all have the same university degree and the same basic skills, but there is a distinct difference between those people who have five, ten, fifteen years of experience working with those skills and honing them on projects that cost $100 million to make, than somebody who just comes out of school.

Our industry really has not a lot of challenge with finding those people who have just come out of school. The challenge is to find those people with more than five years' experience who want to work on those types of games. That's the kind of issue we have. It is very much an issue of experience, yes.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Further to that question, is the issue just simply time in the industry? Or are there programs needed to augment the skill sets of these people who build that time? So you put in five or ten years, are you looking for situations where employees go for MBAs that would help them? Is that what the problem is, or is it just simply time?

[Jayson Hilchie]

I think it's the rapid growth of our industry over the last 15 years versus the number of people who we have. I'll go back to the population comment that I made earlier in regard to the “number one per capita” industry in the world.

We have a lot of video game employees for the number of people who live in this country, so that alone is one of the basic problems we face when we're always out trying to find labour. However, we're realists, too. We work in an industry that has exceptionally transferable skills. That's one of the things that's great about our industry. We create employees who can work in a variety of other industries. Sometimes they do; sometimes they leave. Sometimes, again, we're in competition with other companies for them. So our members and our companies do everything they can to retain their employees, because it's in their best interest, but just like any industry, or any company, it's always the employee's choice as to where they work or who they work for. That creates a problem, too.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

In previous committees there has been a lot of focus on temporary foreign workers and issues there, but when I listen to you, it doesn't sound as though on the labour side the issue is a temporary one. It sounds as though it's going to be a long-term issue, so perhaps the approach we need to take should be more focused on actual immigration, long-term immigration to the country and the skills you need, as opposed to a temporary foreign worker solution.

Is that accurate?

[Jayson Hilchie]

There is probably a mix. I would agree with you that the term “temporary foreign worker” probably doesn't typically define every situation. We've stopped using that term internally and have started referring to them as “global workers”, but in some cases these workers are temporary. They're here to work on a project for two years, transfer their knowledge, learn skills themselves, and then go back to where they're from.

Our company has also used the nominee program to bring people in. A lot of the temporary foreign workers who come into our companies end up becoming permanent residents and Canadian citizens afterwards, so some of those who come in under the temporary foreign worker program end up using the nominee program.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hilchie.

We now go to Mr. Regan for seven minutes.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for coming.

What would be an ideal system for you with regard to immigration or a combination of immigration and temporary foreign workers, and how would you change the temporary foreign worker program?

[Jayson Hilchie]

The foreign worker program works well when it's used properly. We completely understand why we are in the situation we're in with the changes that were made and the problems that arose last April. There is no illusion on our part as to what the problem is.

However, our industry uses the program responsibly. As Mr. Harris said, we pay more to get a foreign worker to come to work in Canada than we would pay if we had to hire somebody who was down the street. There is a considerable amount of cost involved.

Our biggest issue with the program right now has to do with delays in processing labour market opinions and then work permits. Because of some of the challenges with the temporary foreign worker program that have presented themselves, delay times for processing LMO applications have increased considerably.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

How long does it take when you're trying to bring someone into the country to work for you, not as a temporary foreign worker but as an immigrant? What's that like?

[Jayson Hilchie]

That's a good question. We do have some statistics on the processing times for work permits and LMO applications in a white paper we recently did with ITAC.

For an LMO application—not a work permit but a labour market opinion—the current processing time could be up to four months. You have to understand that in our industry—

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

That's not normally for someone who's going to be a permanent resident in any event though. That's for someone starting out as a visiting worker, right?

[Jayson Hilchie]

Under the previous IT workers program that existed up until three years ago, those employees who fell under the IT workers program were actually exempt from LMOs, so there was no wait. Since that program was cancelled and in light of the recent problems with the temporary foreign worker program, we're now up to four months from a period of zero. If you look at how fast our industry moves and how much these games cost, if we're waiting for a senior programmer or a team lead producer or something like that, that could result in a delay of the game, or it could simply result in the game being made in another county.

To answer your question directly in regard to what an ideal system would look like for us, it would be one that allowed us to access the talent we need on an efficient, timely basis.