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“Ubisoft is a Quebec success story,” Mallat said in a speech hosted by the Montreal Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce last November.

Maybe too much so. The company might now be hurting the technology scene that it helped create.

Photo by Ubisoft

Quebecgenerously subsidizesthe labour costs of international multimedia companies that come to the province. That wasn’t a problem a couple of decades ago when the program began; the region was an economic basket case that needed all of the help it could get.

But now, Quebec is home to one of the stronger economies in the country. There isn’t enough talent to go around in Montreal and Quebec City,forcing ambitious executives to curb their expansion plans.And yet a portion of their contributions to the provincial treasury is being used to help companies such as Ubisoft claim precious resources.

It’s gotten tense.

Last year, four chief executives of up-and-coming tech firms — Louis Têtu of Coveo Solutions Inc., Eric Boyko of Stingray Group Inc., Dax Dasilva of Lightspeed POS Inc., and Fred Lalonde of Hopper Inc. — went public with their frustrations ahead of the Quebec election.

“In Quebec’s tech sector, we have been at full employment for a decade,” theysaidin an commentary published in the Globe and Mail on Sept. 19. “Despite this, government officials in Quebec and across Canada have been investing considerable amounts of time, energy and political capital into attracting multinational technology companies to Canada without any studies on the effect they have on the domestic tech ecosystem and our economy as a whole.”