Canada holds on to second place as world’s top country brand

Canada has held on to the number-two spot as the world’s most respected country brand for the second year in row. The ranking comes from the fifth annual Country Brand Index (CBI) by FutureBrand of New York, NY.

“In a challenging year for the global economy, we’re especially pleased with the recognition that Canada’s tourism brand is holding firm in an intensely competitive international tourism marketplace,” said Greg Klassen, CTC senior vice president, Marketing Strategy. “Our travel marketing focuses on enticing travellers with extra-ordinary experiences against a backdrop of vibrant cities and spectacular natural settings. The strategy has market strength and is paying off. We’ve come a long way from an image of moose and mountains.”

After launching the new tourism brand-”Canada. Keep Exploring”-five years ago, Canada leapfrogged from twelfth place in 2006 to sixth place in 2007, and jumped again to achieve the second-ranked spot for the first time in 2008. This year, the United States received a bounce and has earned the coveted spot as the world’s top country brand for the first time, changing places with Australia, which slipped from the premier ranking to number three. Amidst this jostling, Canada’s tourism brand stands strong, resilient and competitive.

Said Klassen, “A country like the United States has a much bigger global footprint than Canada. As we are less well known, our tourism personality, or brand, has to carry more weight to succeed in getting travellers to choose us. This ranking is one way of validating that we’re on the right track.”

In the 28 different categories that the influential CBI uses to determine the Best Country Brand, Canada also ranked among the top five countries in ten of the categories, and ranked first in the categories of: Country You Would Most Like to Live In; Families; Resort and Lodging Options; Political Freedom; Safety.

Other countries making the Top Ten of the global 2009 CBI study include New Zealand, France, and Italy. CBI also identified the United Arab Emirates (UAE), China and Vietnam, respectively, as the top three “rising stars”-those likely to become even more competitive within the next five years.

CBI is a comprehensive study of around 3,000 international business and leisure travellers from nine countries-the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Japan, Brazil, UAE, Germany and Russia. The CTC has marketing programs in seven of them.

CBI examines how countries are branded and ranked, and identifies emerging global trends in the world’s fastest-growing economic sector-travel and tourism, which accounted for US$944 billion in international tourism receipts in 2008. This year’s index includes rankings and trends, themes in nation building and marketing issues, as well as in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Top 10 country brands.

“This acknowledgement of our competitive edge is particularly satisfying as we head into the 2010 Winter Games,” added Klassen. “While the world is captivated, the CTC is executing a well-thought-out strategy to promote Canada’s tourism brand in its global markets. We’ve crafted the script and produced the movie that will inspire travellers to explore Canada because of the 2010 Winter Games-and long after the Olympic flame is extinguished.”

Stealing talent from Uncle Sam

Canada takes aim at skilled immigrants squeezed out by the U.S.

by Charlie Gillis and Colin Campbell on Tuesday, November 10,
Source: Mclean.ca

America’s best friend and oldest trading partner—that’s Canada. Happy member of the world’s largest free trading zone? Sure. But when it comes to the global competition for talent, well, friendship only goes so far. When immigration managers at Canada’s consulate in Los Angeles were asked last year to provide a snapshot of the immigration situation in their region, their tone sounded downright predatory. “Significant numbers of high quality economic class immigrants are being gleaned from this territory,” they wrote in a report obtained by Maclean’s. Most of the workers have been educated at U.S. universities, the document went on, obtaining degrees in valued fields like biomedical research or software engineering. With such talent in short supply in Canada, the pencil pushers in L.A. boasted, “this office regularly engages in promotion and recruitment efforts to exploit this talent.”

Exploiting? Canada? It would seem so—and at Uncle Sam’s expense. As a political war over immigrant workers rages south of the border, Canada has left a key under its mat for those who have been squeezed out and accused in some quarters of stealing high-paid work from native-born Americans. Each year, a wave of foreign-born employees in the U.S. exhausts the sixth and final year of work visas known as H-1Bs—documents created for companies who can’t find homegrown talent to fill certain jobs. But politicians in Congress have for years fought for a cap on the number of new H-1Bs (it now stands at 85,000), which has left thousands of educated, skilled workers out in the cold.

It is these workers Ottawa has been targeting, and its efforts appear to be paying off. During the period from 1998 to 2008, the number of skilled workers coming into the country from the United States more than doubled, from 1,969 to 4,085.

The trend has raised fears among business and political leaders south of the border, who see skilled immigrants as key drivers of economic growth. “The smartest people want to come here and that’s a huge advantage to us,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates told a congressional committee last month. “In a sense, we’re turning them away.” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been calling for an increase in the number of visas, citing Canada, among other countries, as a destination for talent. He points to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy, which found that every time an American technology company requested an H-1B visa position, it added five additional jobs.

In some cases the restrictions have prompted companies to vote with their feet. Microsoft last year opened a 70,000-sq.-foot “development centre” in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond to house 300 workers hailing from more than 40 different countries. Many have “immigration challenges” preventing them from working in the U.S., explains Dennis Pilarinos, a former H-1B visa holder who returned to his native Vancouver to manage the facility. Now, at the sprawling complex, they work on everything from the XBox to Microsoft Office software. The rules have also been a boon for Canadian firms, says Tom Jenkins, executive chairman of Waterloo, Ont.-based Open Text. “It’s left Canada at a competitive advantage for attracting talent.”

Critics wonder whether offices like Microsoft’s represent a long-term gain for Canada. For some U.S. companies, the goal is to create a temporary home for employees before shifting them stateside as soon as possible; others are taking advantage of NAFTA provisions allowing people holding Canadian work permits to do business in both countries. In a practice known as “parking,” employers will place workers in Canadian branch offices, yet have them spend most of their time doing business south of the border.

But Canada’s innate appeal to immigrants often wins out in the end, says Peter Rekai, a Toronto immigration lawyer who has counselled former H-1B holders. “A lot of these workers end up liking things better here, and stay,” he says. “They find that it’s a better climate for them in Vancouver or Toronto—there are bigger [ethnic] communities, it’s more multicultural than where they were in the States.” Nor should Canadians underestimate the sheer demand for skills in certain parts of the country. Alberta, working in conjunction with Immigration Canada, has been running a special program targeting H-1B holders, offering permanent residency to workers with as little as one year’s experience in the U.S. In the past 18 months, it has received thousands of applications and accepted 393 workers—like Carlos Barrios, a civil engineer who jumped at the chance to move his family to Calgary from Houston. Barrios, who is originally from Venezuela, had spent seven years trying to get a green card in the U.S. before “Canada came in and offered me a chance to be a permament resident in less than six months. We love it here.”

That demand could work even more heavily in Canada’s favour as the U.S. economy languishes. This year was the first in several in which all of the H-1B spots made available in the U.S. weren’t filled on the first day (after six months, about 18,000 remain available). In other words, a shortage of work in the U.S., not a shortage of visas, may be driving these U.S. castaways north. Either way, Canada increasingly looks like a net brain-gainer after years of watching its best talent disappear south. The longer Uncle Sam takes to get his house in order, the better it is for us.

Scotiabank inks China banking partnership

* Allows immigrants to open Scotia account in China

* Gives Scotia an early shot at new customers

TORONTO , Nov 6 (Reuters) - Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS.TO) said on Friday it reached a partnership deal with China Everbright Bank [EVRBK.UL] that will allow people moving to Canada to open a Scotiabank account while still in China.

Canada's No. 3 bank said the deal gives Chinese immigrants and students planning to move to Canada the ability to open a Scotiabank account at any of the 119 participating Everbright branches in 33 cities across China.

"We are proud to partner with CEB and to be able to leverage their strong presence in China to reach out and meet the banking needs of people before they embark on their journey to Canada," Scotiabank's director of Asian markets, Gina Li, said in a statement.

Immigrants have become an appealing target for Canada's big banks as they seek to expand their safe and reliable retail banking operations. Immigrants are Canada's fastest-growing population group, and China is considered a key market for Canadian financial service companies.

Once clients open an account in China and move to Canada, they must visit a Scotiabank branch to activate the account, Scotiabank said.

Toronto-based Scotiabank is considered the most international of Canada's big five banks, with operations in much of Latin America, the Caribbean and parts of Asia.

China Everbright Bank, headquartered in Beijing, is one of the largest in China. (Reporting by Andrea Hopkins; editing by Peter Galloway)

Measuring up under the index of prosperity

HOW DOES one measure prosperity?

That question may have been answered by the Legatum Institute, a research and advisory group centred in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with a Centre for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Legatum Institute has constructed the Prosperity Index, which measures global health and well-being by rating 104 nations that account for 90 per cent of the world’s population.

The index scores nations on nine different measures based on 79 different indicators. The goal behind it is to motivate policy-makers, academics and the media to learn more about what constitutes real prosperity.

Canada and the United States placed in the top 10 of the 104 countries rated by the index. Canada placed seventh, the United States 10th.

The top three nations were Finland, Switzerland and Sweden.

The bottom three nations were Yemen, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

The index highlights the importance of several factors in creating prosperity. One critical factor is the presence of a vibrant and productive entrepreneurial base that feeds innovation.

The index revealed the soundest economies are linked to environments that are friendly and supportive to entrepreneurs, and provide support for commercialization of new ideas.

The most highly correlated of all of the scales measured were economic fundamentals and entrepreneurship and innovation.

The entrepreneurship and innovation scale measured the ease with which new ideas led to commercial innovation in business, focusing on new startups, technological advancements and capacity.

The actual number of small businesses in each nation was not part of the measure. The index focused on the dynamic impact that such businesses had on innovative outcomes.

The index demonstrated that economic growth is encouraged by democratic institutions that are open, transparent and accountable.

It also measured personal freedom, in part, by focusing on whether individuals were free to start businesses and whether the nation was sufficiently secure for businesses to grow and prosper.

Canada ranked fourth out of 104 nations for entrepreneurship and innovation, while the United States ranked first. Canada ranked sixth for economic fundamentals, compared with the U.S. ranking of 14th.

Canada ranked sixth in terms of democratic institutions, compared with the U.S. ranking of second, while ranking 16th for education compared with a U.S. ranking of seventh.

The reason for Canada’s lower educational ranking was not clear, but it could be linked to student-teacher ratio, funding and years of secondary and post-secondary schooling.

The health of Canada’s people ranked 22nd. The U.S. failed to place in the top 25. The health measure included such items as infant mortality, health problems, number of health professionals, health satisfaction and issues relating to overall health and availability of health care.

Canada ranked ninth in terms of safety and security, while the United States ranked 19th. This measure included such aspects as how safe citizens felt, the levels of political terror and violence, rates for various crimes and the likelihood of people being displaced or becoming refugees.

Governance, a measure that captured such issues as regulation, political participation, effectiveness of government, confidence in the military, corruption and law, resulted in a ranking of ninth for Canada, compared to 16th for the United States.

Canada scored very high in personal freedoms, ranking third, compared to the U.S. ranking of eighth. Personal freedoms measured such things as freedom of choice, religion, movement, and ethnic tolerance.

Social capital focused on the overall influence on life satisfaction of such factors as relationships, helping others, charity, organizational memberships and trust. Canada scored ninth in social capital, while the U.S. ranked seventh.

While there is always room for improvement, Canada held its own in the third annual Prosperity Index, demonstrating that prosperity is linked to many aspects of governance and community.

A key strength was Canada’s rating for entrepreneurship and innovation, a measure that captures the extent to which entrepreneurship is favoured and embraced.

The index also showed that entrepreneurs play a vital role in growing a nation that is worth living in, and that is something to celebrate. The Prosperity Index can be viewed at www.prosperity.com.

BC's Top Employers

Background
Now entering its sixth year, BC's Top Employers is an annual competition organized by the editors of Canada's Top 100 Employers. This special designation recognizes the British Columbia employers that lead their industries in offering exceptional places to work.

Selection Process
Employers are evaluated by the editors of Canada's Top 100 Employers using the same eight criteria as the national competition: (1) Physical Workplace; (2) Work Atmosphere & Social; (3) Health, Financial & Family Benefits; (4) Vacation & Time Off; (5) Employee Communications; (6) Performance Management; (7) Training & Skills Development; and (8) Community Involvement. Employers are compared to other organizations in their field to determine which offers the most progressive and forward-thinking programs.

2010 WINNERS:

(in alphabetical order)

6S Marketing Inc.
airG Inc.
BC Housing Management Commission
BC Hydro
BC Public Service
British Columbia Liquor Distribution Branch
British Columbia Lottery Corporation
British Columbia Public School Employers' Assoc.
British Columbia Safety Authority
British Columbia's Children's Hospital Foundation
Cactus Restaurants Ltd.
Certified General Accountants Association of Canada
Clearly Contacts Ltd.
Club Intrawest
Coast Mountain Bus Company Ltd.
Davis LLP
Dayton & Knight Ltd.
Deeley Harley-Davidson Canada
EDS Advanced Solutions Inc.
FinancialCAD Corporation
Fraser Health Authority
Goldcorp Inc.
Golder Associates Ltd.
Great Little Box Company Ltd.
GrowthWorks Capital Limited
Harbour Air Ltd.
HSBC Bank Canada
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Ledcor Industries Inc.
Mountain Equipment Co-op
Next Level Games Inc.
Nicola Valley Institute of Technology
Nintendo of Canada Ltd.
Parklane Homes Ltd.
Progressive Solutions Inc.
Providence Health Care
Provincial Health Services Authority
Rescan Environmental Services Ltd.
Royal British Columbia Museum Corp.
Schneider Electric PMC Victoria
Sierra Systems Group Inc.
Simon Fraser University
Sophos Inc.
Surrey, City of
Telus Corporation
University of British Columbia
University of Victoria
Vancity Group
Vancouver Coastal Health Authority
Vancouver International Airport Authority
Vancouver Island Health Authority
Vancouver, City of
Vision Critical Communications Inc.
Whistler, Resort Municipality of
Wickaninnish Inn, The