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notatoad 44 minutes ago [-]
>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.
jt2190 13 minutes ago [-]
Literally the next sentences:
> 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.
9 minutes ago [-]
petcat 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
windowshopping 47 minutes ago [-]
Is this new? I thought this had been the case for decades.
grapeape25 43 minutes ago [-]
Not new at all. Articles have been spouting this for a long time.
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.
varun_ch 29 minutes ago [-]
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?
grapeape25 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaway_2494 25 minutes ago [-]
It's a myth that US income tax is always lower than in Canada.
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.
afavour 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
varun_ch 12 minutes ago [-]
That’s fair. I can see a lot of reasons to stay in Canada over the US for long term plans.
Although it feels like all of the desirable jobs (in terms of technical interestingness and pay) are in the US. At least for internships.
35 minutes ago [-]
opengrass 19 minutes ago [-]
Good thing there's an endless stream of Indians! Even if property values go up by $1 it's a WIN for me, and there is no brain drain in Canada.
--
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"
s0rce 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
bfkwlfkjf 36 minutes ago [-]
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?
jandrewrogers 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
QGQBGdeZREunxLe 1 minutes ago [-]
There was a pathway to citizenship until last week.
Topgamer7 32 minutes ago [-]
The US makes it relatively easy to get a work visa if you have a science degree from a university.
bfkwlfkjf 23 minutes ago [-]
Science degree from a US university you mean? I'm not trolling, genuine question.
rjrjrjrj 13 minutes ago [-]
Canadian university degree is fine.
Look up TN 1 visa if you want more details.
brailsafe 25 minutes ago [-]
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
selimthegrim 34 minutes ago [-]
TN visa
486sx33 4 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
blindriver 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
cogogo 12 minutes ago [-]
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.”
throwaway-blaze 3 minutes ago [-]
"teachers should be paid more" isn't an argument, it's a statement. But perhaps I've made your point for you.
Majromax 19 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
throwaway-blaze 44 seconds ago [-]
You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?
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.
loloquwowndueo 35 minutes ago [-]
> I make more money than all my friends combined
Get richer friends! Problem solved!
pupppet 16 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
yawnxyz 29 minutes ago [-]
that's what happens when your only industries are cooking oil, actual oil, and real estate
throwaway_2494 28 minutes ago [-]
Ok, but how does your hypothetical scenario apply to Canada though?
>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.
More highly educated Canadian and Mexican professionals are relocating to the US than ever before, which is obviously concerning for 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.
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"
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!