Canada – A Model For the 21st Century ?

The title of the post is taken from a three-day master class I attended in 1992, in the Park Lane Hotel in London.

The leader of the master class was Charles Handy, a systems thinker and organizational guru who has long been one of my main inspirations.  Charles suggested back then that the world may come to see Canada as a model for the effective integration of the world’s diversity because of our progressive policies on education, health care, decentralization of federal powers (the notion of subsidiarity), and a basic culture of tolerance, multiculturalism and respect for others.

One of the elements of this orientation that is becoming noticeable is our attractiveness to well-educated talent from all over the world.  Microsoft recently announced that it would be developing a significant presence in Vancouver, one of the reasons being that Vancouver was a very attractive place for high-end talent to live and work.

Today’s Globe and Mail has a piece on the growing attractiveness of Canada as a destination for that kind of talent.  I understand what they are saying in the article, as I see it and live in it every day.

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Canada: A UN of tech talent
PATRICK BRETHOUR

VANCOUVER — Parminder Singh thought he was a Canadian when he applied for a technology-worker visa to the United States in the late 1990s – and with good reason.

He’d lived in Canada since he was six years old, built his career here, and had long since renounced his Indian citizenship in favour of Canadian credentials. But when it came time to line up to get into the U.S. job market for tech workers, immigration officials took one look at his birthplace, New Delhi, and lumped him in with applicants from India. With a low ceiling set for H1-B visas, Mr. Singh didn’t make the cut.

"I felt kind of cheated," he recalled in an interview this week. To make matters worse, his kid sister Amrit applied and breezed through, since she had been born after the Singh family immigrated to Halifax in the 1960s. "As a result, she got preferential treatment!" he exclaims.

Eventually, Mr. Singh made his way into the United States using a NAFTA visa, and landed at Microsoft Corp. The sting of that unhappy visa experience might linger, but it will come in handy at Mr. Singh’s new job: Running the new software development centre that Microsoft is opening in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond – and recruiting workers from around the world.

Parminder Singh, managing director of Microsoft Canada Development Centre, looks over a map marking the diversity of the company at the Richmond office in Vancouver. (Laura Leyshon/The Globe and Mail)

Mr. Singh, whose appointment is being officially announced today, is careful not to directly criticize the U.S. government, but the plain fact is that protectionist sentiment south of the border has meant a hard cap on technology-worker immigrants at a level far lower than what the industry needs. In just one day, U.S. immigration services received 150,000 applications – more than double the total annual quota of 65,000.

So, Mr. Singh has lots of company in the I-didn’t-get-an-H1-B club. Microsoft gets the third-biggest slice of H1-B visas, but the software giant didn’t even come close to meeting its needs.

While Mr. Singh is diplomatic, the company’s government affairs director, Jack Krumholtz, was much more blunt in comments late last month, saying the Richmond software centre was motivated in part by the H1-B cap, and that it could be the start of a bigger move.

"We currently do 85 per cent of our development work in the U.S., and we’d like to continue doing that," he told Associated Press. "But if we can’t hire the developers we need, we’re going to have to look to other options to get the work done."

Faced with the hard cap, Microsoft has come up with a way to cut through the knot of anti-immigration sentiment by setting up a satellite campus in Richmond. Up to 300 employees, software programmers for the most part, will work at the development centre. They will start off with relatively low-grade testing work, but Mr. Singh says he has no doubt that his new hires will be working on major software projects before long.

Canada’s more lenient immigration policy has just become a major competitive advantage in attracting high-paying, brainy jobs. The proof is on the office wall of the development centre, still under construction in the south of Richmond. Tacked on the wall is a world map, with dozens of coloured stickers, each pointing to the home town of one of the newly hired software programmers. There are a smattering from South America and Africa, a generous dusting through Europe and clusters in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and China. There are none in Canada or the United States.

"It’s a United Nations of talent," says Mr. Singh, whose own sticker, of course, points to New Delhi.

But there is something else that the Lower Mainland has going for it in the battle to attract international talent. Any immigrant from China would feel right at home in Richmond, where Chinese-language signs are common and fabulous Asian cuisine is easy to come by. Similarly, nearby Surrey would ease the transition for any recent arrivals from South Asia.

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