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.
Get richer friends! Problem solved!
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.
>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.
More highly educated Canadian and Mexican professionals are relocating to the US than ever before, which is obviously concerning for Canada.
> 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.
It is a non-immigration visa so it isn’t a path to citizenship, just an American job. Many Canadians take advantage of this.
--
Gary Schmidt
Coachmen Catalina RV
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"REMEMBER, I VOTED FOR THE PLANET BEFORE IT WAS TRENDY, DRINK FAIR-TRADE COFFEE, AND QUIETLY CORRECT YOUR GRAMMAR"
windowshopping•42m ago
grapeape25•37m ago
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•24m ago
throwaway_2494•20m ago
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•18m ago
varun_ch•7m ago
Although it feels like all of the desirable jobs (in terms of technical interestingness and pay) are in the US. At least for internships.
grapeape25•7m ago
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.