(Montreal) About 20 Montreal-based professionals lost their jobs when Google Canada carried out mass layoffs across the country on Monday.
The Ministry of Employment and Social Solidarity confirms having received a notice of collective dismissal affecting 21 people from Google, according to information provided by a spokesperson for the ministry.
Google Canada confirmed it made layoffs on Monday, but the employer would not provide further details on the number of workers affected across the country or per office. The company assures that “Canada remains an important priority market for Google”.
The ax fell more than two weeks after the web giant announced it would cut 12,000 jobs worldwide.
While the announcement was anticipated by employees, a terminated employee at the Montreal office says the announcement “still hurts.” “I was very attached to this company and I thought I would stay there for a long time,” he wrote on the LinkedIn network.
In January, Google announced that it would cut 12,000 jobs worldwide. The announcement from the parent company in California had created anxiety in the company’s offices in Montreal, Toronto, Kitchener and Edmonton. In a memo, the multinational had pointed out that announcing the layoffs would take longer in the company’s international offices.
Prior to Monday’s announcement, employees learned that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was closing its DeepMind Technologies artificial intelligence research center in Edmonton. Alphabet bought British company DeepMind in 2014.
The announcement comes amid a cooling job market in the technology sector. Other web giants like Amazon and Facebook recently announced a wave of layoffs. Canadian companies like Lightspeed and Shopify have also cut jobs in recent months.
In November, Google Canada had unveiled its new offices in Montreal with great fanfare. The offices had been designed to accommodate a larger number of employees, up to 1,000 people while the Californian company employed more than 300 people in the metropolis, before Monday’s announcement.
The expertise of Google’s Montreal team is mainly in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and cloud computing. A significant part of the cybersecurity measures surrounding the Chrome browser is made in Montreal.
In 2021, the company stopped developing video games in Montreal for its Stadia platform, a service discontinued two years later on January 18.