Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.(bnnbloomberg.ca) |
Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.(bnnbloomberg.ca) |
>FRANCIS: No, I think, Roger, you pointed to it correctly. This is not an issue that is brand new for Canada.
oh, okay then. so, the same thing is happening as has always happened. the only interesting thing about this article is trying to determine if it's motivated by the opposition party trying to score some points (like it usually is) or by the US trying to share a positive in response to all the "canadian tourism numbers are down" stories going around lately.
> It’s one that we’ve been facing for quite some time. The reason we wrote this report, however, is to highlight the fact that we’re sort of in this moment in time right now, with our relationship with the U.S. deteriorating and us trying to diversify our trading partners, to highlight the fact that we are still not really all that competitive. Our productivity growth is quite low and has been for a few years now. So, banging this drum about wanting to raise this issue around competitiveness, that was the goal of this.
With the U.S. moving from a cooperative trade partner to a trade competitor, Canada needs to up its game.
Even if the US was still benevolent (ish), Canada needed to up its game. I have heard Canada be described as "European wages with American working hours".
It's a great country with good people and lots of beauty, but they need an economy and job prospect beyond real estate, mining, banking, automotive, and government funded. The country seems to lack diversity in prospects and relatively uncompetitive wages.
For those leaving after completely undergraduate schooling that is taxpayer subsidized, there should be both carrots/sticks to discourage it - carrots would be to substantially juice tuition tax credits to give young people a better shot to save coming out of school. Sticks would be that if you are leaving soon after graduating, you are maybe on the hook for paying back some of that subsidized education. I'm not married to the exact carrots and sticks, but the country probably needs to do something short term while they also sort out future economic growth sectors.
More highly educated Canadian and Mexican professionals are relocating to the US than ever before, which is obviously concerning for Canada.
> Colonial administrators in Canada observed the trend of human capital flight to the United States as early as the 1860s, when it was already clear that a majority of immigrants arriving at Quebec City were en route to destinations in the United States. Alexander C. Buchanan, government agent at Quebec, argued that prospective emigrants should be offered free land to remain in Canada. The issue of attracting and keeping the right immigrants has sometimes been central to Canada's immigration history.[245]
One time offers will often only get temporary results.
Anecdotally, a lot of us return to Canada after a short stint in the US.
Speaking as a Waterloo grad that moved to the US for about 5 years post graduation. Many of my university classmates did something similar.
I've done well since then, but being in Canada I'm always "out of band". Implicit implication that I should move south where lower level positions already match Canadian bands
It is a non-immigration visa so it isn’t a path to citizenship, just an American job. Many Canadians take advantage of this.
I'm also from Canada and I know tons of Canadians that have come here since the 90s. I even known immigrants to Canada from other countries (mainly China and India) that came to the US via Canada, using the TN1 or H1B visas after getting their Canadian citizenships.
The biggest problem Canada has is that any moderately successful tech worker is going to be dead-set on trying to get into the US because the Canadian tech scene can't compare based on base pay, annual bonus, starting equity or refreshers, etc. I make more money than all my friends combined. One of my friends is a teacher in Toronto and my annual bonus is more than his entire yearly salary.
I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers. There's literally trillions of dollars in tech ideas that could have been created in Canada but all of the founders left for the US.
I'm not sure that Canadian taxes compare that unfavourably to combined California plus federal taxation. A deeper, more structural limitation appears to be the venture capital environment, namely that Canada doesn't have a good one.
Canada's investable capital is dominated by pension funds, insurance companies (i.e. pension funds), and banks (i.e. pensioners). All are risk averse (https://thelogic.co/news/bdc-canadian-venture-capital-report...), which makes it hard for Canadian startups to begin scaling. Without native "unicorns" (https://financialpost.com/technology/why-canada-best-startup...), there's allegedly a failure-to-launch for the entire sector – tech billionaires being some of the most reliable early-stage investors with the greatest risk tolerance.
The porous border works both for and against the sector. On one hand that makes it relatively easy (but not automatic) for a Canadian tech company to enter the US market, but on the other hand it's also relatively easy for Canadian tech workers (founders included) to simply relocate (note the article here). If startups leave for the US's vast fields of venture capital, they're less likely to come back. Note that around the turn of the year Y-Combinator halted investments in Canadian firms (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/adding-canada-back) because they so frequently relocated to the US.
This venture capital cycle seems to be a deeply-entrenched and very hard problem. If democratically feasible tax incentives could reliably create "the Silicon Valley of X," then we probably would have many more Silicon Valleys both in the US and elsewhere.
It's concentration of nodes in the graph that makes SV unlike any other place on earth.
Other places that want to be SV need to solve the cold-start problem to build up their local node set, not emulate what SV is like today.
Get richer friends! Problem solved!
I believe that my comment above was aligned with your premise here. I say that the tax difference is not sufficient by itself and that Canada reportedly has a very non-SV-like venture capital ecosystem.
But eventually life catches up to you, especially if you have strong family/social roots in Canada. It's not easy to bootstrap that in a new country.
I was also there under a TN Visa and had a few border experiences that rubbed me the wrong way since the TN Visa is a bit hand wavy and up to the border guard at your time of entry. The hostility at times from the border guards didn't make it feel like I was returning "home". Sure, I worked for a company that had an army of lawyers to fix it if anything went wrong but it still leaves you with a sour taste. I can't imagine they're getting any friendlier these days.
Lastly, I didn't mean it like 5 is some magic number - some stay less, some stay more.
I worked in the US for a bit when I started out. I paid more income tax in CT than in Toronto on the same salary.
I just wanted to come back home. Even in small town CT, there were areas we were told to stay away from after dark.
1) more interesting work opportunities; and
2) more money
And the delta on (1) has never been smaller thanks to remote work post-covid (even after all the RTO).
So basically, at some point, you start asking if the extra money is worth it.
(Depending where you come from in Canada, lifestyle in SF might be better overall - but then you can just move back to somewhere else in Canada and have it all.)
Although it feels like all of the desirable jobs (in terms of technical interestingness and pay) are in the US. At least for internships.
Peter Roberts the immigration attorney that regularly posts here can validate that.
Edit: You still need to be a Mexican or Canadian citizen.
EAD/AP shows up in around 4-5 months for most people and those restrictions are then no longer a concern.