Industry committee  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 s

Industry committee  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

Industry committee  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 tempora

Industry committee  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

Industry committee  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 highlig

Industry committee  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

Industry committee  Yes, absolutely; if those changes go through, they would significantly impact some of our global companies that have locations in other countries. It is an issue on which we have been quite proactive and for which we have been advocating. We met with the Minister of Immigration j

Industry committee  The United States and Japan are the two biggest. The United Kingdom, in fact, used to be the third largest video game industry in the world and is now fourth, possibly fifth; I don't know. A lot of expats from that industry have helped contribute to the Canadian industry, because

Industry committee  Countries such as Korea and China—those types of emerging economies—certainly are growing at a rate that I believe could in the future threaten us.

Industry committee  The biggest threat to us, and this is one of the reasons for many of the meetings I have here in Ottawa and for many of the comments you hear from our organization, is focused on continued access to the high-quality talent that we need to be able to continue to grow. Look at the

Industry committee  It's 16,500.

Industry committee  Our members do a number of things. They're doing everything, from grassroots-level consulting with universities and colleges to make sure that the curriculum is up to date and that they're graduating students with the skills our industry needs today. We're a fast-paced, innovat

Industry committee  That's a good question. For me, it would be to go to a school that has a reputable curriculum, that is known for producing graduates who are going to the companies that are making the games. First of all, they need to figure out what it is they want to do. Do they want to make

Industry committee  We've really narrowed that down to two major points. We've recently quantified this in our research, but we knew it before qualitatively anyway. Canada has a great talent pool. I know that I talk a lot about access to talent and the senior and intermediate talent that we need.

Industry committee  Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you very much for having me here today. My name is Jayson Hilchie and I am the president of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada or ESAC. ESAC represents a number of leading video game companies in the Canadian industry from multi