Trapeze Animation struggles to fill positions

I had this brought to my attention a while back, should have posted it sooner. I wanted to get a comment form Trapeze but didn't hear back from them. Either way, the gist of the story over at cbc.ca is this: Trapeze Animation, of Charlottetown, PEI, can't find enough animators locally to produce their show, Razberry Jazzberry Jam.
This is a problem I had to deal with while recruiting a few years back for Fatkat in Miramichi. Running a studio in a small centre like these guys do has some real challenges. Here in Ottawa, or Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, you have a talent pool to draw from. When work dries up somewhere, there's often another gig available down the street. Not so for these little shops. Fatkat was able to land enough wok to offer their people long term contracts, and even they had to make some cutbacks a while back. Financing through tax credits puts limitations on the amount of non-local talent you can use, but quite frankly, for the geographically expanding industry, information technology and the freelance community is the answer. The same way we once shipped work overseas and ran small prepoduction crews ten years ago, perhaps small, remote shops like this should focus on maintaining a small creative hub and farm out the grunt work to the freelance community. It's a solid model, but you have to adjust your pipeline to accomodate it.
Best of luck to Trapeze.