Ubisoft Took the Subsidies. Workers in Montreal and Halifax Took the Fall | The Walrus

Chris came back from his winter break feeling energized. Ubisoft’s Halifax studio, where he worked, had recently unionized with 74 percent support, joining CWA Canada. On January 5, employees returned from vacation eager to prove that unionization would make them stronger workers. But two days later, it all came crashing down.

Jean-Michel Detoc, chief mobile officer from the company’s France office, walked through the front door, unannounced. Dread descended upon the staff. By 10 a.m., all seventy-one employees were laid off. Some started crying. Others were furious. “You lose your job like that—it sounds dramatic, but it’s a traumatic experience,” says Chris (whose name has been changed to avoid professional repercussions).

A company-wide announcement later that afternoon spelled out the reasons: a “shortage of viable work both immediately and in the forecasted future” meant that the Halifax office no longer had a “justifiable mandate” to continue. “I’m thinking this is really confusing, because we’re all super busy,” says Chris.

Chris is now looking for a job and fears speaking out, because in the video game industry, talking to the press can be a death sentence for your career. I contacted five other employees, none of whom were willing to go on the record.

Ubisoft, the video game publisher behind massively popular franchises, like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, shrank from 21,000 employees globally to 17,000 between 2022 and 2026. In 2024/25, they cut as many as 500 jobs in Montreal as well as seventy-one in Halifax. Before the layoffs, the company had 5,000 employees in Canada, with around 4,000 in Montreal and the rest spread across Quebec City, Winnipeg, Toronto, Chicoutimi, and Sherbrooke. It’s been reported that Ubisoft plans to lay off another 200 to 400 people internationally this year (a company spokesperson declined to comment on the matter in a response to The Walrus).

The Halifax office closure was widely seen as union busting. Employees said there was no correspondence with them or the union before the layoffs. (“All impacted employees in Halifax were informed of the closure at the same time on January 7, 2026. Ubisoft immediately contacted the union on Jan. 7 to begin discussions, including negotiations regarding additional severance,” the Ubisoft spokesperson said in the response.)

Soon after the Halifax operations were shut down, the union filed an unfair labour practice complaint with the Nova Scotia Labour Board. “All the tech places are trying to fight (unionization),” Nasr Ahmed, an organizer with CWA Canada, says. “This decision to form a union was not done out of malice, or anger towards any specific studio manager, or even the core sort of corporate, larger entity of Ubisoft; they did it because they saw how instability in the industry was taking shape”—the type that leads to mass layoffs, like the sector at large is experiencing in Canada.

Subsequently, in April, three months after the labour board complaint, the Halifax employees “voted overwhelmingly in favour of a settlement” with Ubisoft, according to a statement from CWA Canada. The terms of the settlement, including the compensation employees would receive, remained confidential. Ubisoft maintains it did not shut the studio down because of the union. “The closure of Ubisoft Halifax . . . resulted from a broader cost‑savings effort that began more than two years ago, well before the studio’s unionization process in June 2025. Ubisoft has taken similar actions across its organization,” the spokesperson noted.

Meanwhile, there are different issues affecting workers in other locations. Earlier this year, Ubisoft demanded that employees return to the office. The order applied company wide.

David Michaud-Cromp, a former Montreal employee, spoke out publicly against the return-to-office order, saying in a post on LinkedIn, “So . . . Ubisoft wanna bring back 5 days in the office . . . because they ‘believe in collaboration’ . . . but c’mon, we’re not completely stupid . . . we very well know why you want to go back to 5 days in the office . . .” with a link to a YouTube video that claims back-to-office orders are a way to force employees to quit. He was fired several days later, with Ubisoft citing their code of conduct as the reason.

In the response to The Walrus, the spokesperson said, “We have a clear Code of Conduct that outlines our shared expectations for working together safely and respectfully, which employees review and sign each year. When that is breached, our established procedures apply.”

What’s worth noting here is that taxpayers are effectively financing this corporation—to the tune of $980 million since just 2020, according to French senate documents obtained by CWA Canada. And it’s not Ubisoft alone. Governments are aggressively courting large gaming and tech firms with public funds but remain silent when they need to be held accountable.

Ubisoft was one of the earlier companies to take advantage of the robust incentives built in Quebec in the mid-1990s. Known as the “Montreal Model,” the system was meant to attract global investors and boost local employment through massive tax breaks and subsidies. A company coming in from France was a logical fit. Thanks to this system, Ubisoft transformed from a mid-sized studio in the late 1990s to one of the biggest in the world.

“In 2001, I got my first job thanks to these types of subsidies,” says Jonathan Lessard, undergraduate program director for design and computation arts at Concordia University. The subsidies, which involve direct government transfers to support projects and offset costs, have long been used to help studios hire emerging workers and expand production capacity. “In the beginning, we definitely needed foreign expertise, but once the expertise becomes local, the tap should be open for local developers.” In Lessard’s view, it’s probably time to rethink Quebec’s tax incentives: new studios or Montreal-based developers could be the beneficiaries of such measures, whereas international corporations should not have the same level of benefits.

Yves Guillemot, the chief executive officer of Ubisoft, has testified before the French senate that he saves 8 percent of each employee’s salary in France—and “more than three times that” in Canada thanks to the tax incentives. I broke down the approximate amounts the company has saved through tax breaks—a reduction in the amount of tax a company is required to pay—and other incentives since its establishment in Montreal in 1997. According to my calculations, the data shows that Ubisoft has received as much as $2 billion in tax incentives in the decades since in Quebec and across the country.

The Ubisoft spokesperson didn’t confirm the figure but said, “The video game industry contributed $5.1 billion to Canada’s economy in 2023–24. . . . In Quebec alone, the sector generates $1.4 billion annually,” adding that “these types of returns from the private sector are only possible because of the competitive economic development programs.”

In a 2017 release, Ubisoft announced they were on track to invest $9 billion in Canada’s gaming industry by 2027. But this doesn’t account for the large sums that continue to be transfused into Ubisoft from tax incentives, including Quebec’s tax credits, the Ontario Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit, and the Manitoba Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit.

The Ubisoft spokesperson noted: “Tax credits apply only to eligible work on eligible projects, they do not cover all employees, and for employees it does cover, it’s not all the time. Eligibility and scope are also different in each province. It’s also worth noting that tax credits are applied only after eligible work takes place on an approved project, and after taxes are paid in the relevant jurisdiction.”

The establishment and eventual destruction of Ubisoft Halifax was possible only because of how appealing Canadian governments made video game development to companies. Without Quebec first establishing a successful template, Ubisoft may not have begun its expansion across the country.

The “Montreal Model” has similarly attracted a variety of other major companies, many of which have not worked out. Eidos Montreal, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montreal are prime examples. They were beneficiaries of the same tax breaks as Ubisoft and were attracted to Montreal by the talent and infrastructure. In 2022, Embracer Group purchased Eidos and Crystal Dynamics from Square Enix. Less than six months later, they shut down Square Enix Montreal (renamed Onoma), causing 200 people to lose their jobs. Eidos was also hit with layoffs, and over two years, more than 200 people were out of work. The studio previously developed well-loved games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided and is now relegated to being a support studio.

The Quebec government didn’t have a contingency plan for if or when these companies abandoned ship. There is no clause in the tax laws that allows the government to prevent layoffs or recoup money. If the government wanted to, it could pass amendments or laws that would allow them to do so. Put another way, these companies were benefiting from tax incentives that paid for nearly a quarter of their employee salaries, but when the venture stopped meeting expectations, they laid off their employees, shut down their offices, and moved on. The story in Nova Scotia is much the same: advantageous tax systems with no downsides to mass layoffs.

The Quebec ministry of finance told me it was thanks to the tax credit system that a video game sector was established in the province, but they did not indicate any interest in changing the system to reflect the modern state of video game development now that the industry is established.

The federal department Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada (ISED) did not answer most of my questions and indicated they intend to continue providing tax incentives and financial support to tech sector giants, having given millions to Ubisoft to help with its expansions in the mid-2000s.

This hiring–firing, boom–bust cycle is fairly common across the tech sector, from video game companies to web developers to artificial intelligence companies. The tech sector is proving to be exceptionally volatile, with an estimated 150,000-plus jobs cut in the past year across the globe. Canada is no exception. Nonetheless, the government is courting major tech companies and narrowing its focus on AI development. It is hoping to turn Canada, particularly Montreal, into a major AI hub.

Most governments across the country, from federal to municipal, have become obsessed with the idea of “efficiency” and are betting big on an AI future. Prime Minister Mark Carney campaigned on a program to improve efficiency by deploying AI “at scale.” This year, the City of Montreal allocated $835 million to build AI-ready data centres, as well as $96 million being invested in AI innovation. Mila, an AI research centre run by the Université de Montréal and McGill University, is receiving a $250 million increase in funding for its development. Numerous other, smaller investments have also been announced.

AI companies are still years away from making a profit, if they ever do. The government is dumping billions into an industry without a guaranteed return and creating few jobs through the data centres being built. In fact, it’s more likely they are leaving Canadian workers vulnerable by financing the industry without putting in place appropriate safeguards to protect workers’ rights.

This is on top of multiple major policy failures for the Liberal government when they attempted to enforce some sort of control over tech companies, first with the Online News Act and then the Digital Services Tax, which was cancelled to appease United States president Donald Trump.

Various public investments have achieved the goal of establishing the tech and gaming sectors across Canada. However, the corporations attracted by these subsidies have demonstrated themselves to be unreliable stewards of public goodwill, consistently prioritizing private gain over the long-term stability and protection of their Canadian workforce.

“What are we saying,” says Ahmed of CWA Canada, “if we’re going to bend over backwards for these multinational corporations when they use and abuse Canadian workers?”

Isaac Peltz is a journalist from Montreal nominated for a Digital Publishing Award.