>ROGER: Okay, how does this compare to the ’90s when we saw a brain drain then? Is it larger? Different sectors?
>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.
> 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.
The monumental obstructions to getting anything done in Canada, from bloated beurocracys that are in the business of denying the service they were created to provide is a huge obsticle to starting a business here in Canada, hence the fever dream of joining the EU and exploiting millions of imigrants to do the actual physical stuff for cheap and obiediently, lest they run afoul of the many rules ,regulations and conditions on which there forever pending citizenship depends, which favors existing LARGE businesses to scale up,leaving high talented people with little real oportunity.
So ya, a lot of people set out to get a grub stake or just give in and take the highest bid.
It looks like the major difference recently is that TN visa issuance has surged in recent years, up to over 1.2 million in 2023. The previous all time high was back in 2016 (~800,000).
More highly educated Canadian and Mexican professionals are relocating to the US than ever before, which is obviously concerning for Canada.
The not-so-top secret way to get rich as a Canadian new grad in tech is to get a job at a unicorn by way of TN status, hop around for ~5-10 years, possibly getting an H-1B, but never pursuing a greencard.
Accumulate wealth by any means necessary. If you find yourself with nice RSUs or options, hang on to them or exercise them, respectively.
When you're fed up move back to Canada and enjoy no exit tax and enjoy the step-up cost basis on all your assets. Sell all your RSUs and pay nearly zero capital gains. Use your imagination here.
(If you are unlucky and only have losses, well, you'll never really be able to use them tax-wise.)
It’s more than that, right? Canadian real estate is bonkers for example, and would still be even if we magically elevated Canadian salaries to US levels.
I think ratios are worse in Canada pay/housing. SF/Bay are also nice because you can make a lot, rent, and then move away to low cost housing. The opposite doesn't work - you can't make a bunch of money in Canada and go elsewhere to cheaper housing, at least not easily. West coast wages are probably objectively bloated, but that bloat is the primary reason global talent flows there with the plan to not necessarily stay there forever.
> 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]
As a current Waterloo student (who is not particularly tied to any specific place). I’m curious about this and I’d like to know more. Why US for 5 years and why back?
Right out of school it was fun and easy to drop everything and go somewhere cool (SF, NY, etc.). Can tell everyone you work for a flashy big tech company, make a ton of money, and have no responsibilities.
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.
Can’t speak for the OP but it’s often about what’s most valuable at different points in life. Depending on where you are in the US, having kids can be a formidable experience. Poor leave, expensive childcare, etc etc. It can change the calculation for whether the extra money in the US is actually worth it.
And to simplify, there’s also really only two reasons to move:
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.)
Not really new, been going on for decades. With recent political changes I would have assumed it might have been getting better actually. I'm guilty, Canadian living in the SF Bay area.
Back in 2019 Microsoft sent job offer, 145k usd/yr base moving to US. Couldn't get visa (no degree). New offer: 95k cad/yr in Vancouver
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
ELI5 - Canadians can just cross the border and get a job in the USA? No need for work visa? Is that by virtue of being Canadian citizens? What are the legals?
TN1 visa allows Canadians to work in the US indefinitely in most professional-type roles e.g. teacher, engineer, accountant, etc. It doesn’t require much more than a job offer to get the visa.
It is a non-immigration visa so it isn’t a path to citizenship, just an American job. Many Canadians take advantage of this.
It's easier to get a job for a company in the U.S than it is to cross the border with a job in the U.S. If you have a degree and a job, great, otherwise no
I'm sorry but is this an article from the late 1990s?
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.
Something feels deeply wrong about comparing your tech income to a teacher’s. Especially outside the context of an argument like “teachers should be paid more.”
> 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
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.
Those are the biggest exports from Canada. The problem is that Canada is fundamentally a resource-extraction and export economy, but has become rich enough to have some fine educational institutions. These fine institutions produce graduates who don't understand the fundamentals of their economy, but they sure can passionately tell me why Trump is a RRRRACCCISSST.
>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.
Accumulate wealth by any means necessary. If you find yourself with nice RSUs or options, hang on to them or exercise them, respectively.
When you're fed up move back to Canada and enjoy no exit tax and enjoy the step-up cost basis on all your assets. Sell all your RSUs and pay nearly zero capital gains. Use your imagination here.
(If you are unlucky and only have losses, well, you'll never really be able to use them tax-wise.)
> 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]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight#Canada
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.
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.
--
Gary Schmidt
Coachmen Catalina RV
Member: Glen Abbey, Fairmont Banff
"REMEMBER, I VOTED FOR THE PLANET BEFORE IT WAS TRENDY, DRINK FAIR-TRADE COFFEE, AND QUIETLY CORRECT YOUR GRAMMAR"
I suppose data could be used to justify whatever position and thus earn daily bread for the headline. Tomorrow there’ll need to be another story.
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.
Peter Roberts the immigration attorney that regularly posts here can validate that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36913448
Edit: You still need to be a Mexican or Canadian citizen.
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!