With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/383533
28 BCBusiness OCtOBER 2014 Telus Garden tower in early 2015. Last year, Twitter fl irted with the idea of opening a Global Centre of Excellence in Vancouver, a workaround scheme for (mainly) Chinese nationals hired by the company. Intel, Salesforce, SAP, Sauce Labs and Australian website Freelancer.com all operate engineering offi ces of some sort or another. And then, of course, there's Microsoft, which has been in B.C. on and off for over two decades. It fi rst made the move here in 1991 to purchase Consumer Software, a Vancouver com- pany pioneering "electronic mail," in a deal pegged at $15 to $20 million. But by 1994 it had shut down that operation, transferring 85 of its employees to Redmond, Washington. In 2007, Microsoft returned—this time explicitly for immigra- tion purposes. "We opened the lab because we were having trouble getting visas for the best and the brightest," said then- CEO Steve Ballmer, echoing grievances over the U.S.'s 65,000 cap on H1-B visas. And then this May, the company announced it would be moving into the former Sears Build- ing in downtown Vancouver, adding 400 new roles, in what Microsoft Canada president Janet Kennedy defi antly says is "not a call centre." Not all tech giants are attracted primarily for the tempo- rary benefi ts that Vancouver off ers. Global electronics giant Samsung opened its local development centre in 2013— hiring, in part, from a recently defunct Nokia satellite offi ce, which shut down in 2012. Samsung was drawn to Vancouver by the availability of hi-tech talent, says Tom Nyberg, senior director and general manager of the company's Vancouver Enterprise Lab. And while Nyberg says that Canada's immigration rules were an important factor in Samsung's decision, "[they're] not the primary reason we're here." The company, with 33 research and development sites world- wide, recruits locally for the most part, he adds. There are multiple ways to bring an employee into Canada. If the employee is from Mexico or the U.S., securing a work visa under provisions set out in NAFTA is relatively straightforward, at least for in-demand fi elds like software development; if the applicant has been on the same payroll for one year or longer, they're eligible for an intra-company transfer visa. But when it comes to new hires, employ- ers have typically turned to Canada's temporary foreign worker program, says Craig Natsuhara, a Vancouver lawyer who works on busi- ness immigration issues. The temporary foreign worker visa required a labour market opinion ( LMO) from Service Canada, whereby the employer had to prove that they could fi nd no Canadian qualifi ed for the position. That process often took months, says Natsuhara—unless you were hiring for a position eligible for an LMO exemp- tion, the list of which included most computer programming roles. The LMO exemption made Canada an attractive place to set up shop. A company could hire for certain occupations—like software developer and game designer—without advertising the position in Canada, allow- ing them to bring in a developer within weeks. But with changes introduced by the feds in June (replac- ing the LMO exemption with the lengthier, more expensive "labour market impact assessment"), a process for getting a visa that took weeks is now expected to take months. And it's not just changes to Canada's immigration laws that threaten to alter the equation for Vancouver's tech community. In the U.S., pressure is mounting to lift the cap on H1-B visas. Microsoft has off ered to pay a $10,000 bounty to the American government on every successful H1-B visa application, while President Obama is expected to lift the cap on visas following the November mid-term elections. Still, Bill Tam, president of the B.C. Technology Industry Association, argues that companies such as Amazon and Microsoft aren't just focused on parking people here and moving them across the border when the time is right. "There's a great amount of talent available locally," he says, noting that Microsoft is staffi ng up its downtown develop- ment centre "so that it actually has development capabilities that will remain here in Vancouver." And even though the new federal rules have caused some concern, it hasn't curtailed demand for foreign workers, says lawyer Craig Natsuhara. Vancouver's digital media studios alone have around 2,000 positions to fi ll in the next quarter, he notes. "There's a real need for foreign workers in key positions." • SOURCE: LinkedIn TECH EMpLOYEES IN VANCOUVER 1,458 363 357 264 85 69 66 65 48 2 (at peak) When it comes to new hires, employers have typically turned to Canada's temporary foreign worker program, says Craig Natsuhara, a Vancouver immigration lawyer. A com- pany could hire for certain occupations —like software developer—without advertis- ing the position in Canada, allowing them to bring in a developer within weeks