AMAZON’S VANCOUVER ‘NEWS’ LACKS KEY FACTS
Much-ballyhooed announcement fails to say just who will be getting the jobs
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s flashy announcement that Amazon has promised to bring 3,000 more high-tech jobs to Vancouver in the next few years has a surreal quality, which grows more mysterious for lack of facts and context.
Trudeau’s April 30 event, at which he boasted about “Amazon’s commitment to recruiting top talent from our universities,” raises more questions than answers, particularly about the role played by Canada’s migration policies in producing the country’s high-tech labour force.
The promotional news releases about how Amazon will take over part of the redesigned Canada Post Office building in downtown Vancouver contained no person to contact for further information. And, for reasons unexplained, no politician was even present from B.C.’s NDP government.
Adding to the puzzle, especially about who will be hired by Amazon in Vancouver and elsewhere, two academics who are experts on the large proportion of foreign workers and international students in Canada’s high-tech industry aren’t returning requests for interviews.
It’s natural to applaud the expansion of the high-tech industry in Metro Vancouver, where CBRE Labor Analytics estimates roughly 65,000 are already employed.
But why does Trudeau, a globalist who champions free trade and the free movement of labour, not talk about federal foreign-worker-recruiting methods in the country’s technology sector, especially in contrast to the more protectionist approach in Donald Trump’s U.S.? Perhaps it’s because these are multi-edged, emotive issues. Their thorny nature is likely the same reason the prime minister did not mention — as the City of Vancouver quietly did when it lobbied to become Amazon’s second headquarters in North America — that high-tech wages in Metro Vancouver are the lowest on the continent.
I’m not aware of anyone who has an answer from the federal Liberals on whether the government has offered tax, migration or labour concessions to Amazon to bring the technology giant to Vancouver and other parts of Canada, where it already employs more than 6,000 people.
After all, the federal government and B.C. Liberals granted a labour-market exemption in 2014 to Microsoft so it would expand operations in Vancouver. The exemption means the Seattle-based multinational can hire foreign workers in Canada without first having to prove qualified Canadians are not available.
The extent to which Canadian high-tech companies rely on foreign workers, international students and would-be migrants is explained in the book Trans-Pacific Mobilities: The Chinese and Canada (UBC Press), edited by the University of Calgary’s Lloyd Wong, with a key contribution by SFU’s Karl Froschauer.
Although Wong and Froschauer have never responded to my requests for interviews, they wrote in Trans-Pacific Mobilities that Metro Vancouver’s high-tech companies assertively look abroad for workers, mostly from Asia, and especially in India and China.
They do so, the sociologists write, because it means they can “spend a very small fraction of their salary budget on training and because B.C. universities produce relatively few graduates in the technology field … High-tech computer programming and computer systems analysis have been the two most common intended occupations of all skilled immigrants to Canada.”
Some international financial experts, however, are beginning to be more upfront about how one reason Canada’s high-tech sector is growing, particularly with satellite U.S. companies, is it is easier to get a visa to work in Canada than south of the border.
To put it simply, Canada’s open attitude to tech talent is the opposite of Trump’s, where the current national motto is, “Buy America. Hire America.”
Trump talks about further cracking down on the country’s coveted H-1B visas, which are used to place foreign workers in high-skilled U.S. jobs. As the BBC reports, U.S. politicians place a tight cap on H-1B visas because many do not want to see them used to replace skilled American workers with cheaper overseas counterparts.
Trudeau, on the other hand, is fast-tracking offshore hightech workers and students. He’s brought in efforts like the Global Skills Strategy, which builds upon the 2015 “Express Entry” program; a free, online process that allows skilled workers to apply easily to immigrate.
Of the 500,000 international students in Canada in 2017, which was a 20 per cent jump from 2016, many are studying in technology fields.
One advantage in their coming to Canada is that — unlike in the U.S. where they are normally not allowed to stay in the country after they graduate — they can stay at least three years extra in Canada to work and go to the front of the queue for immigration. Another advantage of starting in Canadian hightech is that foreign nationals who work for an American satellite company for one year can then get an intercompany transfer to the U.S.
Data is not available on how many Canadian-born or raised young people are getting jobs in the high-tech sectors in Vancouver, Toronto and across Canada. While employers routinely claim there is not enough local talent to hire, some B.C.-based business professors counter that there aren’t enough jobs for students graduating out of Canada’s high-tech programs.
In the midst of such transnational confusion, shortage of facts and sometimes fantastical claims, there are pros and cons to the way the high-tech sector in Canada has become key to what Brock University researcher Zachary Spicer calls a globalized “brain churn.”
The world’s skilled workers, whether in Asia or North America, are not just flowing in one direction. They’re “churning,” shifting rapidly from country to country while chasing the most strategic jobs, with the restrictive U.S. generally being most sought-after, in large part because of its stronger salaries.
Raza Mirza, a high-tech worker in Vancouver who was recruited from Pakistan by a U.S. high-tech company, is not following the lead of many of his colleagues and moving to the U.S., even though he could make at least $40,000 more.
Separate from his own interests, he’s among many convinced the United States’ relatively protectionist approach to foreign labour, compared to Canada’s open policy, is definitely boosting the high-tech sector in Canada.
“I believe the shortage of U.S. talent, and the U.S.’s unwillingness to let companies bring in more global talent, has been a huge factor in why U.S. technology companies are increasing their Canadian footprint.”
For reasons unexplained, no politician was even present from B.C.’s NDP government.