The crazy thing is Canada has so many advantages that should make paying higher salaries easier. University is cheaper, so people don't have as much (or any) student debt. Healthcare is cheaper for companies to provide - since they generally only have to offer supplemental coverage. And so on.
We are even starting to have them manage doctors!!
When I was at Google, I learned from an internal pay comparison spreadsheet that a person in the same job at the same level is paid much worse in Waterloo (and in the UK as well) compared to SV / NYC, and the reason cited was "cost of labor" or some such fancy term which essentially meant "we want to pay as little as possible, so a little bit more than our competitors". So ultimately, it boils down to "prevailing wages" in Canada (and the UK).
The first company to offer SV level wages in Canada / UK will see a deluge of high quality applicants who want to stay in those locations for whatever reasons. I wonder why no one has tried that yet.
The business climate might just be better in the US.
But the salary is still higher in America. So you can go to America without the student debt, and still get the higher salary. And why not? (You could think of this as arbitrage between two ways of structuring society economically.)
But maybe the thing to do is to go back to Canada when you have kids, so that their university won't load them down with student debt.
1) You will likely pay more in taxes in California than Canada.
2) It's easier to itemize self-employment tax expenses in Canada, so you can easily pay half the taxes of the US. (I paid 12% of total income the last year I worked in Toronto.)
3) Everybody I know in Canada is happy with health care, and infinitely happier than Americans who've received false bills.
4) Startups have a big advantage in Canada because of the state health care, and unrelated lower salary expectations.
However, salaries are lower in Canada because companies pay less (like Europe or anywhere outside the US), but that's not related to taxes or health care.
In the American company, the managers want me to succeed because that is directly link to their success. I'm part of the team, I'm accountable, but I had more freedom.
In the Canadian one, managers want all the credit (pay+bonuses+recognition), because they are the incredible one who made the monkey produce the value. I'm part of a pool, managers will decide what programming language I'll program in, he's managing the risk after all. Oh, and by the way, it was a hard year, not all goals where reached, so they need to cap the bonuses, but the company is glad for the all-time profit record.
Of course, it’s a bit of a caricature. It surely applies to US or Canadian company. But our perceived value struck me in all my employers.
Yes, sometimes those experts are wrong or their ideas are not compatible with the general direction of the company and that's where you really want a leader's judgement but the solution to this problem isn't to ignore the expert, it's to find a compromise, verify information by asking multiple experts with differing opinions, make the experts understand the goals of the company.
In theory being a manager is the easiest job in the world. You delegate all your competence away to people who are better than you at the skill you are delegating. So the only challenge is to utilize the value of that competence properly.
Even with that in mind, in a number of recent years, the median Canadian tax bill has been lower than the median American tax bill [1]. And to your point, it varies by state/province. The most expensive state OR province for high-income folks is California (51.9%) and the lowest is Alberta (39%). [1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/canadians-may-pay-more-taxes...