Money Flooding Out of Canada at Fastest Pace in Developed World

An aside UK property at the low end: the move from HA/Council rents to private rents (i.e. from around 350 to 750 per month outside the Great Wen) is going to make the current debate about livable wage interesting. Some Tories already coming round to rent cap/build for controlled rent.

Obviously no protectionist scheme is going to tax goods that it's market cannot produce, but there is always a tendency to put industry above consumer, and assymetric/mercantile style protections in place.

People often have intellectual debates about ideology/philosophy here, but nationalism is the real political force. If a government can be seen to steer its economy in the right direction, and its people feel well off compared to their neighbours, it will be popular, regardless of ideology, and regardless of how fairly it has treated other nations in trade negotiations.

Likewise, a state will inevitably favor free trade when it will profit over other states, and protectionism when it won't.

In the rare case when both states will benefit from an arrangement, there's usually some third party getting screwed, i.e.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC

I'm conflating capital controls with trade, but my point is more that they are often negotiated at the same time, and in the with the same ultimately selfish and unideological outlook.

High capital flows do correlate with frequency and severity of financial crises:

http://www.voxeu.org/article/ez-crisis-and-historical-trilem...

This is why poorer countries tend to enact capital controls. Foreign capital has a tendency to flee all at the same time (for a safe haven like America), which is ruinous for the economy. There's something of a feedback loop there.

This is why some investors describe emerging markets as markets from which it is difficult to emerge in an emergency.

That would make quite a nice animated visualisation.

The Canadian environment is extremely fertile for exploitation by US companies though, and we're having some success working with them already. It helps that the exchange rate is favourable. I would like to see much more competition and American money around here if only to teach the crusty old guard what it means to be innovative.

I'd love to see services overtake natural resources as a main export because it would be more sustainable and it would improve the lives of regular people a lot more than, say, unrefined oil or softwood lumber do.

The US is a very large place with a lot of cities, it has 30 cities the size of (or larger than) Vancouver. You can find good software engineers across the entire nation, including in lower cost locations. From Portland, to Las Vegas, to Kansas City, to Raleigh, to Atlanta, to Detroit, to Pittsburgh, to Tulsa etc. You have dozens of cities to choose from that will have good engineers.

There's no reason you'd need to pay bay area salaries or locate in Silicon Valley (or NY). Unless you're trying to build the next juggernaut tech-startup and are going to take on the VC to match (in which case that pays for the high salaries).

- Cost of most goods is still more than the US since we import them

- House prices are higher

- Quality of developers isn't necessarily as high (less universities and less students choose CPSC)

For most Canadian software engineers it's more worthwhile to work remotely or to relocate.

This is the mindset that got Canada into this situation in the first place.

As a recent Waterloo grad, I've witnessed first-hand how the tech industry in Canada has been bleeding talent to the US, even from our own top schools. Just about everyone I know who's good enough to have offers from US companies have taken the offers and left.

And it's not hard to imagine why: the average "highly competitive" salary in Canada is pathetic compared to what you could be making in the US for a similar position.

I think Blackberry has been a prime example of a company hit by this. Even with the advantage of being literally next door to the Waterloo campus, most students I know treated it as nothing more than a "safety" in their co-op and grad job search. So in the end, the only students Blackberry ever had access to were the ones who weren't good enough for the US companies, and the few good ones who couldn't to go to the US for what ever reason.

I can't see this trend slowing any time soon, unless Canadian companies start offering salaries competitive with companies across the border, rather than just with their other Canadian neighbors.

My retirement funds have, as some of their holdings, a comparatively small handful of shares in companies, as part of a fund managed by an institutional investor, whose goal is to deliver shareholder value to people who hold shares of the managing organization, which may be completely separate.

Saying "Your interests should be aligned with exceedingly wealthy individuals because you hold shares in some companies which they control." is wrong at best, and disingenuous at worst.