TECHNOLOGY CONUNDRUM
How can we attract movers, shakers?
With resource revenue in the tank and Donald Trump in the White House, Canada is trying to vacuum up the best and the brightest technology workers and entrepreneurs it can.
And why not? Technology industries are clean and green. Employees are well-educated and well-paid and, chronically, in short supply worldwide. The fact that Trump’s travel ban has tinged this economic opportunity with a humanitarian grace is a bonus.
Vancouver is already a global animation hub with Sony Pictures Imageworks, DHX Media, Electronic Arts, Atomic Cartoons and others doing not only animation but virtual reality applications. Currently, there are more than 300 unfilled jobs in Vancouver’s animation industry.
Those 300-plus vacancies are nearly double the number of jobs advertised last August, which gives some indication of just how much work is coming here. It also hints at how much work might be going to competitive hubs in Singapore, Manila and Mumbai as local companies are forced to turn down work.
But it’s not just animation jobs that are going begging. Other homegrown companies like Hootsuite, Sierra Wireless, Stemcell Technologies and Vision Critical also face shortages.
After months of study, the federal government finally set a timeline to get its global skills strategy up and running. Starting June 12, work permits won’t be required for short-term work (30 days or less) or brief academic stays. Others with special skills will be fast-tracked into Canada with the government promising to issue work permits to companies within 10 days to two weeks. Companies will then have two weeks to issue them to employees. That will help.
But the biggest hurdle for B.C., and Vancouver in particular, has nothing to do with visas, permits or even subsidies. The housing costs are simply too high, Andrew Harries says.
Harries is a co-founder of Sierra Wireless and professor of practice in entrepreneurship and innovation at Simon Fraser University’s business school.
“We should all hope for an orderly drop in house prices and encourage all levels of government to make that happen,” he says. “For the sake of a sustainable society, we need to find some kind of sustainable link between salaries and housing costs.”
Even for most tech workers earning a wage 75 per cent higher than the provincial average, the housing they want is out of reach.
In 2015, the average annual income of British Columbia’s nearly 102,000 tech employees was slightly less than $83,000. But Harries says that means tech workers still can’t afford much more than a cramped condo in Yaletown or a house that’s nearly an hour’s commute away.
Factor in being paid in Canadian dollars, and Harries says many people aren’t willing to do that — including some of the estimated 300,000-plus Canadians working in California’s tech sector.
Harries lays the blame for the housing crisis on Premier Christy Clark.
“The housing market has gone completely mad,” he says. “But (it) has become so economically dominant, developers so influential in our political apparatus, that it remained largely untouched until the level of citizen unrest finally reached Victoria last summer.”
Yet even if housing affordability was addressed and thousands of tech workers flooded in, the more challenging question is how to create and sustain an indigenous technology sector that isn’t dependent on importing ideas and people.
Harries says the answer is simple: Immediately double the number of computer science and computing engineering spaces at B.C. universities.
Currently, British Columbia graduates 1,200 a year. On Tuesday, one employment website listed 2,175 jobs for computer science. There were also more than 3,000 for science graduates.
But it’s not just the STEM graduates — science, technology, engineering and mathematics software engineers — who are in short supply. There’s an equally crucial lack of people who know how to manage and expand companies beyond the startup phase.
On Tuesday, Clark promised at the B.C. Tech Summit that by 2022 there would be 1,000 more tech grads each year. On Monday, NDP Leader John Horgan promised an extra $100 million for post-secondary programs in digital media, entertainment, life sciences, IT and engineering.
So, by all means, let’s sweep off the welcome mat. But if Canada is to ever transition from a resource-based to a knowledgebased economy, it’s going to take more than that. It’s going to take money to address both the housing affordability crisis and ensure that Canadian students have affordable access to the training they need to compete for these well-paid jobs.