>ROGER: Okay, how does this compare to the ’90s when we saw a brain drain then? Is it larger? Different sectors?<p>>FRANCIS: No, I think, Roger, you pointed to it correctly. This is not an issue that is brand new for Canada.<p>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.
Literally the next sentences:<p>> 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.<p>With the U.S. moving from a cooperative trade partner to a trade competitor, Canada needs to up its game.
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).<p>More highly educated Canadian and Mexican professionals are relocating to the US than ever before, which is obviously concerning for Canada.
Is this new? I thought this had been the case for decades.
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.<p>--<p>Gary Schmidt<p>Coachmen Catalina RV<p>Member: Glen Abbey, Fairmont Banff<p>"REMEMBER, I VOTED FOR THE PLANET BEFORE IT WAS TRENDY, DRINK FAIR-TRADE COFFEE, AND QUIETLY CORRECT YOUR GRAMMAR"
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.
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.<p>It is a non-immigration visa so it isn’t a path to citizenship, just an American job. Many Canadians take advantage of this.
The US makes it relatively easy to get a work visa if you have a science degree from a university.
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
TN visa
I'm sorry but is this an article from the late 1990s?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>Canada's investable capital is dominated by pension funds, insurance companies (i.e. pension funds), and banks (i.e. pensioners). All are risk averse (<a href="https://thelogic.co/news/bdc-canadian-venture-capital-report-2024/" rel="nofollow">https://thelogic.co/news/bdc-canadian-venture-capital-report...</a>), which makes it hard for Canadian startups to begin scaling. Without native "unicorns" (<a href="https://financialpost.com/technology/why-canada-best-startups-fail-become-unicorns" rel="nofollow">https://financialpost.com/technology/why-canada-best-startup...</a>), 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.<p>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 (<a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/adding-canada-back">https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/adding-canada-back</a>) because they so frequently relocated to the US.<p>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.
You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?<p>It's concentration of nodes in the graph that makes SV unlike any other place on earth.<p>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.
> I make more money than all my friends combined<p>Get richer friends! Problem solved!
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that's what happens when your only industries are cooking oil, actual oil, and real estate