We need smarter ideas this election

In the blitz of pre-election announcements, you may have noticed Premier Doug Ford popping into Meta’s downtown Toronto office. He was there to thank Meta for planning to hire “more than 2,500” people in Canada over the next five years. While details remain limited, it certainly sounds like a big number of high-paying jobs in the knowledge economy.

But after Ford’s Meta photo-op, a lot of emails were flying around, all asking some version of the same question: “Where are they going to find the people?”

Business leaders in Canada’s tech ecosystem have been outspoken about the dire shortage of skilled talent needed to meet the growth demands of local companies. If you’re experienced in any number of tech disciplines, you’re not struggling to find a job. In fact, your biggest hassle is fending off recruiters on LinkedIn.

A big jobs announcement is catnip for any politician who’s campaigning for re-election.

But Meta won’t be creating new jobs in Ontario because we already have zero unemployment among the software engineering roles that the company says it’ll be focused on.

And I’ll let you in on another little secret: The Progressive Conservatives know better, because they’ve also run up against the skilled talent shortage.

Last year, with much fanfare, the government launched an ambitious Ontario Digital and Data Strategy with a lot of good ideas for ways to modernize government services. One component of the strategy was a Digital and Data Innovation Fellowship, which proposed seconding mid-career private sector professionals to the government to help guide digitization efforts.

It would’ve been a win-win, with the government leveraging private sector expertise, and companies afforded the opportunity to better understand how government systems worked.

Then in February, an email to stakeholders from the government arrived: “As you know, the labour market for digital talent is extremely competitive, and as a result the organizations we extended offers to are unable to participate at this time.”

The Ontario government solicited submissions — and even extended fellowship offers! — but ultimately, the whole thing fell apart because companies simply could not part with their skilled talent for eight months.

The labour market is just too tight right now, and yet, somehow, we’re supposed to believe that Meta will “create” 2,500 new jobs? In a zero-unemployment labour market, there is no job creation, only job shuffling.

When political leaders — of all stripes and at all levels of government — participate in these types of announcements, what they’re really doing is applauding Big Tech for coming to Canada to recruit talent away from domestic firms and stifling their future growth prospects.

As Ford was standing shoulder to shoulder with Meta, the Council of Canadian Innovators was releasing our Talent & Skills Strategy, with 13 policy recommendations that can meaningfully increase the supply of skilled talent in Canada — through improvements to our post-secondary system, supports for company-led upskilling and retraining programs, introducing new immigration pathways, and other important measures. Our message to politicians and civil servants is clear: to meaningfully grow Canada’s tech sector, the priority of all governments must be talent creation, not job creation.

As a first step, though, we need politicians and voters who truly understand the digital economy. It’s not enough to heartily endorse a vague hiring announcement. We need public servants to provide nuanced, sophisticated and impactful support to the local ecosystem. What we’re seeing right now is not it.

The email from the government said they’d had a “great learning opportunity” with the failed Digital Fellows Program. Let’s see some smarter ideas in this election campaign. Domestic firms are watching closely.