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“People have a bit of trepidation when they come into the market,” said Greg D’Avignon, CEO of the Business Council of British Columbia (BCBC).
The BCBC contributed $1.2 million in 2015 to the HQ Vancouver initiative, which sought to attract Asian companies to move their North American offices to the province. D’Avignon chaired the board of the project.
“If [businesses] recruit somebody, say from Germany or from the U.S. or from Europe or South Asia, and it doesn’t work out, there aren’t a lot of other companies to turn to, unlike the case of Seattle,” D’Avignon said, noting that top talent just down the I-5 could bounce between head offices like Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT), Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN), Starbucks Corp. (Nasdaq:SBUX) or Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA).
