Canada's new tech talent strategy
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Not to mention our housing is in a ridiculous bubble and our economy in general isn’t in great shape.
I suspect there may be an increase of TN visa applications / brain drain of existing Canadian tech workers.
Source: Someone who has been working for US Tech companies from Canada at nearly no (-5%) salary difference to my US counterparts.
Also, do you ever meet your colleagues in person?
With this last company I’ve been meeting in person about once a quarter. Which has been nice.
An enormous chunk of our GDP growth comes from real estate transactions, we don't have much productive endeavours other than natural resource extraction. Canada is still very much a colony.
Come on now. Yes by total land mass you are correct, but if you’ve driven from southwestern Ontario to Halifax or Winnipeg to Calgary, you’d seen thousands of kilometres and millions upon millions of acres that could be developed. Practically developable land is 100% not our limiting factor. We artificially restrict both density in existing cities and expansion of cities due to zoning but this has nothing to do with being “barely livable frozen rock”.
The farmland you're speaking of is still relatively expensive, there isn't much economic activity other than industrial farming (do you have access to several million $ for machinery and land?) in those areas to sustain a life, and it's still frozen 6 months a year. It's also owned by someone and developing it into endless suburban sprawl hurts our already limited food production (which is strategically essential when we consider the geopolitical instability our world is facing). Crown land is for the most part either Tundra, Canadian shield or west coast mountains that is even more difficult to live on than the farm land near the US border.
My folks own a cottage 1.5h away from smack middle of Toronto (I drive it often)
We call it a cottage because it has no running water, no broadband, overhead electricity lines that literally gets knocked out during bad storms.
All of our neighbors are in the same boat. Thousands of southern rural Ontarians live like this.
The difference is that they live this way full year round.
We are so behind as a country in infrastructure that it's not even funny.
To be developing those rural land you talk about will probably cost $100B over three decades at the rate we build things.
I'm not hopeful.
Highest debt to GDP in G7s, meaning a large portion of people bought recently or HELOC'd are leveraged up to secure their place in the market.
Detached housing is at 40% non owner-occupied in BC, I'm sure it is worse in Vancouver metro area. [1]
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-mortgage-fraud-...
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=461000...
Looking at it in another way, if you gave every homeowner in the country a lump sum of cash equal to the amount of equity gained through mortgage payments (not including equity gained through appreciation), many/most homeowners would not be able to afford to buy their homes at the current valuation even starting with that lump sum of cash.
- A Canadian living in the US
Maybe there was some truth to that in the past, but that certainly isn't the case any longer, and hasn't been for some time now.
In practice, Canada's social programs are tremendously costly, limited, and low-quality.
The provincial public health care systems are relevant examples of this. It's typical for Canadians with the means to do so to seek medical treatment in the US or abroad, rather than dealing with the slow and ineffective Canadian systems, especially for any serious ailment.
The provincial public education systems are similar. Canadians with the financial means to do so will send their children to independent schools, rather than public schools. Even those who don't have the means will still do what they can to make that happen.
In terms of the broader quality-of-life picture, it isn't what it used to be. Housing is prohibitively expensive. Food, fuel, vehicles, and other essential goods are expensive. There's much less variety and choice when it comes to retail, restaurants, entertainment, and so forth. The taxation is excessive, especially for getting so little in return. Government makes it far harder than it should be to start and operate a business.
At this point, Canada is coasting on past success, and has a reputation that no longer matches reality.
My favorite example of this is Chretien's secret trips to the Mayo Clinic in 1999. <https://web.archive.org/web/20100204202553/http://www.montre...>
Check out https://www.levels.fyi/leaderboard/Software-Engineer/Staff-E....
It's shameful that we have 6-700k people here in the US that are effectively treated as second class 'citizens' and a permanent underclass. I knew one guy who had been waiting on a green card for over a decade.
They are either second-class non-citizens (compared to those on immigrant visas) or if using “citizen” broadly to call all those who are immigrants by intent (regardless of status) as well as actual citizens, something like third-class citizens, behind both legal citizens and permanent residents.
IMHO, the H1B should be abolished, and we should adopt a Canadian style points system that sets a high bar, but once admitted, automatically grants a green card. I think even Hayek himself basically admitted that our worker visa programs were effectively a labor subsidy to megacorps because these workers did not have the same abilities to negotiate and switch companies as others.
That is not like other countries. China, for example, is happy to give you a Z visa every year without any path to permanent residency. 9 years and never offered permanent residency, not that I would have probably taken it.
Just remember, Canada is geographically situated near the US but their attitudes to innovation, risk taking, rewarding talent, and merit based promotion are not the same. Even if they say that it is - the reality is very different.
But, they are only comparing against the US. If you start comparing against the rest of the world, Canada is the only non-declining large economy.
Wages in Canada are second only to the US. AI (industry of the future) has a base in Canada that is non-trivial. Canada is getting more internationally connected, which means more business.
Compare with UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, where else is the economy looking at the industries of the next decade?
Tech is the easiest industry to bootstrap - just get more tech people to create the ecosystem. And Canada was looking for immigrants. This move to poach h1bs from the US is no different from Meta poaching from Google back in the 00s.
This is true, however the growth isn't actually from increased productivity, per-capita GDP is flat. It's entirely driven by high levels of immigration. So the standard of living isn't increasing. Maybe that's ok, since perhaps it's "good enough", but it's not necessarily attractive versus say various Europe nations if you're privileged enough to have the latter as an option.
What I would like to know is what can Canada do, tangibly, to increase wages to USA levels?
Now this is a great question. Imo, they should follow the strategy of Asian countries.
Asian countries started creating competitive ecosystems when they went through the manufacturing boom in the 70s-00s. What kind of competition? They incentivized and allowed many small companies to come up. They killed large megalocorps so that competition survived. They allowed creating international linkages for their people and businesses. They created massive infrastructure to aid these companies to trade among themselves, thus building an ecosystem. Then, they invited foreign companies to open shop locally.
In the Canadian context of today, they'd need to incentivize creation of companies, perhaps through tax breaks. Build more roads, more houses, higher speed internet, create efficient ports and business laws that allow things to move faster. Dismantle some monopolies. Allow people to trade faster. E.g. a lot of Canadian businesses don't realize that they could leverage their businesses to create outposts in Dubai, Singapore, and other such financial hubs. Just opening offices there allows business to come into the company.
Easier said than done of course. But of all the rich countries (minus USA), only Canada managed to achieve anything in the last decade, thanks largely to the immigration reform.
Simply making bureaucracy easier/cheaper to navigate would be enormous. The barriers to entry for services as simple as cleaning windows, mowing lawns or painting drywall are gigantic relatively to the simplicity of the services involved.
That's so, so wrong.
Be sure to tell Hyundai, Samsung, and LG that their government killed them.
Chaebols are certainly a Korean quirk. Not seen as much in other Asian countries. But even in Korea, the chaebols are dependent on small Korean suppliers to these large companies. It is competition among these small suppliers that has made the economy dynamic and innovative.
US immigration literally runs lotteries for various streams including H1b. It doesn’t feel great when your work/future/life depends so heavily on a coin toss. And we’re not yet even talking about being at the mercy of an immigration officer.
If you check housing prices, the picture gets even worse. Even with seeing how crazy Seattle housing market is, Vancouver beats us easily with their residential property pricing.
- Weather is much worse in Canada than in SF (comparing with this because Balaji tweet did)
- 20% foreigner tax on home ownership
- crime in Vancouver is about as bad as SF
- rent to income ratio is higher, so less disposable income
- lower tech in general, less fiber penetration, worse wireless telecom
- job switching is harder because of sparse job market
OP described Indians so mentioning that there is a massive backlash in the mainstream against Indian immigration. Long healthcare waits and overall poor patient experience isn't a problem since doesn't apply to emergency care in either place and Indians can get better care in Indian private system for elective.
- The foreign buyers tax doesn’t apply to those with PR.
- A very quick search doesn’t support the claim that crime is as high [0].
- Rents in Vancouver absolutely are high, but tech pays significantly over the median. I’m not sure there are good statistics to compare here.
- Vancouver itself has pretty broad fibre coverage, I get gigabit for ~$70/mo, but yes mobile telecom is more expensive.
- I don’t really have enough data to comment on that last point.
[0] https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Can...
Which provider? I will be arranging internet in my new home in a few weeks and it would be great to have this rate.
What's frustrating about it is that it's an expression of contempt for Canada's nationals by a governing class whose capital is already managed globally, so in their view, what does it matter if they import cheap labour and disincentivize capital growth with new industry when they can just tax farm income from a permanent underclass of workers who bring in salaries from foreign revenue?
It would be great if the H1-B's were coming here to do startups, but startups are the artifact of a uniquely American capital ecosystem that just doesn't exist anywhere else, and you can't reproduce something that was the effect of factors that were a moment in time. The strategy is just another expression of contempt of the citizenry by Ottawa. This cohort of government always goes on about how "diversity is our strength," but the emphasis has always been on the our part, meaning theirs, and increasingly at the expense of everyone else.
[EDIT] To be clear, I get why this narrow slice of the population isn't one they're worried about bending their immigration system to accommodate, and I'm not mad about it, it'd just be really cool if we accidentally got helped by some other, larger reform.
When people lift and immigrate from across an ocean the proposition for going back is not as strong or easy. There are a lot of 'sunk cost' issues and 'image' that come into play.
Net migration is probably pretty high in Canada right now and will increase once people figure out that there is not enough density or proper housing for them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/onta...
I am waiting to see what the cabinet shuffle looks like, but we are probably going to run some billboard campaigns or do some fundraising soon to address the housing crisis if the government is not tackling this properly. If you are Canadian or have interest in this space on addressing these social issues, hit me up.
If you are in a TN-1 visa, I strongly recommend doing the math to see if you want to spend a significant amount of your income on rent, definitely do your research.
These days everyone with a pulse is remoting for US companies as the salaries are enormously better than offered locally.
If we were actually like other engineers, everyone would know Coq. Can you imagine building bridges the way many companies do code?
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
The law is sort of vague on it. It says that you aren't allowed to mislead people into thinking you are a professional engineer or use terms that would lead people to think you are a professional engineer if you are not. Whether or not 'software engineer' does this can depend on your viewpoint and whether you're building software for web stacks or for airplane control. But the engineering bodies have tried to make examples of companies or individuals that don't have big enough legal resources to want to go to court over it.
IMO I understand the professional bodies wanting to ensure nobody is misrepresenting themselves as licensed P.Eng holders but claiming a monopoly on the engineering mindset is a bit of gatekeeping and nothing else.
P.Eng is not required for most engineering activities. One notable exception being civil engineers, since there's so much signing off on blueprints for infrastructure.
The engineering bodies categorically take the position that you can't use the word 'engineer' anywhere in your title, say that you do engineering, or do engineering under their definition of it without their license. See this recent letter for example [0] or their FAQ on it [1]
[0]: https://engineerscanada.ca/sites/default/files/2022-08/2022-... [1]: https://engineerscanada.ca/become-an-engineer/use-of-profess...
Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries permits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505152 - June 2023 (232 comments)
(Also don't forget the IT job market which has slowed practically to a halt, as a direct opposite of that Strategy)