Canada forgot to plan for its future by leaning on oil and the loonie
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
Even the way we do provincial transfer payments is sane. While one industry is booming (Oil, manufacturing, tech) other "have not" provinces get payments through the federal government. This brings a measure of stability to the system.
No rational economist can look at the situation in Canada and say that "Canada forgot to plan for its future by leaning on oil and the loonie" it's a ridiculous statement.
Criticizing Canada's action on climate change is warranted, but our federal economic policy has been quite level headed.
Look at the allocation of most mutual funds that a Canadian owns as part of their retirement portfolio.
Look at the nature of the previous gov'ts budgetary and economic planning (in as much as they did that kind of thing). Overwhelmingly in favour of the resource sector.
1. American / international subsidiaries. 2. Mid-sized CCPCs. 3. Owned by private equity firms.
I agree that Canadians do not allocate their retirement savings correctly and that our stock market is not a reflection of our economy, but our government has common sense measures to support a variety of industries.
A high dollar also favoured those industries against all others. Not sure if the feds could have done anything about the high dollar, but it certainly choked everywhere outside of the resource sector.
A low dollar combined with high investment in education makes Canada a good place to invest to get high skilled talent cheaper. Many American tech companies did this around 15 years ago, I worked for a couple -- marketing/sales HQ'd in the US, engineering talent in the GTA.
Er, oil is priced in USD and exported from Canada. A low dollar favours oil production just as much as any other export.
You seem quite married to this simplistic thesis that oil is Canada's downfall, but "just look" isn't an argument. I looked, and the non-oil economic output continued to grow through the oil boom, just not as fast as the oil and gas sector. Yes, oil was a temporary boost, but the country isn't any worse off than if it hadn't extracted that oil. By the way, the government does not enforce oil production quotas in Canada. The fact that the world oil price soared above $100USD causing massive production increases in Canada was not an economic policy of the Canadian government. That's the market economy functioning, not central planning as you imply. The government didn't peg the CAD to world oil prices, the international currency markets did. NOT producing oil in the highest price environment in the history of the world would have been an economic loss for Canada.
Furthermore, the last government, like the current one and every Canadian government in living memory, gave billions in handouts to every sector of the economy, especially manufacturing. The federal government spent billions balling out the US automakers in Canada. Yet manufacturing has been declining since the 1990s, long before the current oil boom. Have you seen a chart of labour productivity in Canada vs. the US and Mexico over the last 20 years? We're a high-cost low-productivity environment and not just because of a high dollar. Having actual social security programs and higher unionization rates places a big, structural role in failing to attract and retain manufacturing capacity within NAFTA.
It's puzzling that you think the oil production boom in Canada was caused by the Canadian government when production was booming in every petroleum producing country in the world because of high global demand. It's even more puzzling that you think the oil boom of the last 10 years and the supposed policies of the last federal government account for global macroeconomic trends that have existed for 20-30 years.
But from their words -- openly lambasting Ontario and Quebec and their provincial gov'ts -- as well as actions they showed a disregard for diversification. Instead of investing money in infrastructure which would increase manufacturing sector effectiveness, they cut gov't revenue significantly, rolled out a variety of boutique tax cuts, and where they did spend money significantly it was in their own ridings. The disparity in the amount of highway construction in Alberta vs. Ontario for example is pretty staggering. And the only two places to see subway construction in Ontario were in Tory ridings -- Vaughan and Eglinton-Lawrence.
I don't really want to defend the Harper government's track record on transportation, because I don't think they did enough, but trying to say that Canada lacks economic diversification because Harper didn't build enough subways is just ludicrous.
Government program spending both in real $ and as a percentage of GDP are higher today than when Harper took office, although they've declined from the peak of the 2008 recession and stimulus program. Direct program expenditure by the federal government was 12.8% of GDP in 2005-06 and 12.9% in 2014-15. Cutting taxes doesn't mean cutting spending, if the economy is growing. The biggest cuts to government spending occurred during the 1990s as part of Chretien's deficit elimination program. Spending has only now recovered to the level of the mid-90s. This is all shown in Finance Canada's fiscal tables. I suggest you examine the numbers yourself rather than relying on newspaper editorials that cherry-pick examples.
Luckily, political capital is a fiat currency and can be created or destroyed by the CBC in moments.
Even the way we do provincial transfer payments is sane. While one
industry is booming (Oil, manufacturing, tech) other "have not"
provinces get payments through the federal government. This brings
a measure of stability to the system.
Any rational economist can say that Canada went all-in on oil because that is exactly what it did. A prolonged stretch of an inflated loonie has resulted in a long-term reduction in manufacturing capacity which means that the country is not poised to take proper advantage of the decline in the dollar that has now occurred. Instead there will be a ramping-up period where productivity is lost.
Governments could also have established rainy day funds. Alberta has one, but they haven't added anything to it since 1987. Canada as a whole has none (this is somewhat reasonable, as the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over natural resources)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust...
I disagree. The upswing of the commodity cycle is precisely when you sell. Who knows, maybe oil is obsolete in 10 years. Then we're sitting on a pile of worthless gunk. Get your money when the gettin' is good.
That's environmental concerns aside. There are pretty good global and domestic reasons for leaving the most marginal bits of the gunk in the ground. And leaning into the cycle develops precisely those marginal sources that were most polluting or least profitable.
YES!
I live in Quebec city and there is a rampant idea in the population that the status quo is the only way forward. More petroleum exploration, larger highways, big government mining investments/subsidies initiative like 'plan Nord', big fat houses in the suburbs that you can spin after 2 years for 20% gain... we never allow ourselves to think outside the box.
I'm glad the US is 'embracing' successes like Space X, Tesla, Uber, AirBnb, ... to really show us what innovation looks like. You CANT innovate if your mind live in the status quo.
With the $CAD drop and the rise of remote work we should also expect a massive brain drain... although it's anecdotal, my brother just accepted a job (remote from Quebec) for a US-based company at double the salary he would have got from a local one. That can't be good for locally-made innovation.
Refs: http://www.petrolia-inc.com/en/corporate/projects/anticosti-... http://plannord.gouv.qc.ca/en/
Pour être plus positif: connais-tu le secteur aérospatial de Montréal? C'est une partie importante de l'économie qui est souvent méconnue (manifeste dans la réaction vis-à-vis l'aide d'un milliard de $ offerte à Bombardier). http://www.aeromontreal.ca/sector-aerospace/
I'm reaching the point where I need to hire developers soon. I'm worried about what kind of talent I'll be able to find, simply because most people worth their salt are already employed, or work in the Bay.
Remote is an option of course, but it adds a lot of complexity that most early-stage startups can't manage well.
I'm seriously considering going back to SV.
What am I missing here? Every time I read about this stuff I always get the impression that tech is this abstract thing that barely makes profit and lives on investments while "traditional" businesses lives on selling actual things that creates profit.
Which is why I'm neurotically nervous over an impending tech crash when the dust settles and App Startup X, Y and Z will probably never be profitable with current tech salaries.
Most startups in the tech sector are exactly as you describe. And that's the point. Eventually, one of those startups finds something that can turn a profit. They build something that people want and are able to push on a few levers and ramp up profitability.
Apple, Google, Facebook, and many more, started out as small startups that barely made profit and lived on investments. Eventually, they got their shit together and became some of the world's largest companies. However, most startups that existed at the same time as them, heck, may have even had similar ideas as them, crashed and burned. That's the nature of venture capital. Throw a bunch of money at a bunch of ideas and see what sticks.
And if you think that's a very haphazard way of investing, you're right, it is. But as a percentage of total investments made by many funds, VC funding is a very minor portion, so they can somewhat afford to make these bets (and lose).
I imagine if "SnapChat" blows up, they won't need to hire the engineers GameApp0, FoodApp1, CarApp2 let go. It doesn't really need to scale like a "traditional" factory.
I get what you're saying, and I am not arguing against your points. I am just trying to get clarification if I'm worried for no reason. The salaries are high because so many startups live on credit. Eventually they die and the supply is higher than the demand.
If you're sufficiently motivated, you'll always be able to find work, either as an employee, or as an independent consultant.
You do know that tech centers in the US are outliers and general policy in the US is basically the same as Canada, and other countries that have a large mass of natural resources, Australia for example.
Mass exploitation of every resource in reach will make us rich. Or, to put it another way 'Drill baby drill.'
Silicon Valley and those that think it's different live in a little bubble that doesn't reflect the way the rest of the country thinks or acts. So moving to Silicon Valley because you don't like the short sighted drain every resource because it's cheap right now line of thinking won't be an act to change any of that, it will just let you ignore that it's happening.
Your odds are vanishingly low when it comes to succeeding in a startup. As a founder, you should do everything you can to stack the odds in your favour.
Edit: I can't respond to your reply, so I'll do it here. It's not just about funding. It's about finding like-minded individuals that are similarly motivated. It's about finding talent. It's about culture.
I love Toronto, and I love Canada. I want to be here. But it's better in SV for tech startups.
To your edit: > It's not just about funding. It's about finding like-minded individuals
That's one problem you're part of fueling. There is no reason you can't have people work remotely. You shouldn't have to go to a physical place to find like minded people. However, thanks to people looking at funding can only happen in SV, and then start-ups being somehow having such a backwards view that if you're not in the seat I can see it's to hard to work as a team, and the believe that the only place to find decent, 'like-minded' people are in SV, everyone has to go to SV to get a job.
So a little bubble ends up sucking up a whole bunch of money and being a contributor to growing social problems in both SV and where ever everyone comes from.
Isn't the average cost of a home nearing $1M in the GTA core? From what i've read, Toronto isn't that far behind SV when it comes to real estate price inflation.
I think that if your main goal in your startup is to raise capital from tech investors then you are correct that SV is where you need to be.
But in terms of actually building a business in the early days where head-down heavy lifting is required, I don't really see what SV offers that Toronto or Montreal do not. There are countless brilliant people in the Canadian tech community if what you are looking for is discussion or mentorship.
A much larger labor pool. In Silicon Valley, provided you're willing to pay, you can find experts for pretty much anything computer-related. You can find people looking to work at startups, willing to put in the hours, and willing (somewhat) to defer compensation. I'm sure there are a lot of smart people in Toronto and Montreal, but tech people flock to northern California from all over the world.
I'm curious what these growth sectors are? Are you referring to software companies? Because though I agree that's a growth sector, it's hard for me to envision how many jobs that creates in the long run. Wouldn't it create the same problems as manufacturing, i.e. it's cheaper to outsource or automate so its job pool will shrink over time? Resources and manufacturing are real, tangible things that have real tangible value. Services, though the natural growth of an economy it seems, are fleeting and easy to do without when things go wrong.
I agree that we can't lean and need to encourage a diverse economy, but I would also argue that investment in any area is a gamble, and gambling is hard for a government to do when under constant public scrutiny.
I was doing my Masters in Medical Imaging at the University of Toronto (did not complete). The number of talented students and professors that I interacted with on a regular basis was astounding. And they were working on really amazing things.
Here's a group of potentially 100s of well-educated students that came out of the Canadian education system, so our tax dollars went towards a lot of their training. And once they're done their PhD, they're stuck trying to compete for very limited faculty positions, or finding a post-doc program somewhere, usually abroad.
The brain drain in biotechnology is the one we should be worrying about. We have fantastic resources available here in terms of teaching hospitals and facilities, but no one's taking advantage of it. And the space of biotechnology is so broad and unexplored, that we could be investing in a number of avenues to try to achieve something in the area.
To quote the cliched Wayne Gretzky: Skate to where the puck is going, not where it is.
So I think Canada has a long way to go before it can stop or reverse the brain drain in the software industry.
If you want talent, it's certainly available, and it's cheaper than SV.
If nothing else I'm hoping they're hard at work making the next Deus Ex game at Eidos Montreal :)
Yeah. I work close to Ubisoft, and there's a cluster of startups around its offices. At lunch hour, all of the local eateries are full of hacker types.
Who exactly is this "we"? You personally can invest in whatever sectors you like, and so can your neighbours. How is that not enough?
As a Canadian in tech, moving to SV is something I regularly consider. However, the nonsense that is Bay-area politics is really off-putting. Unfortunately, the state and federal politics are hardly any better. Americans seem to hate each other.
There are many things that are attractive about the United States. The politics are definitely are not up there on my list.
(That being said, from Toronto maybe it's not such a big step down. The Rob Ford fiasco appeared to be a symptom of deeper problems.)
It's like living in 1999 again.
Also, getting people right of school is a good way to get talent before it moves south.
That said, free healthcare counts for a lot. Also, as a dev in a Canadian tech company, you are probably not going to see as much stress and volatility as your average Silicon Valley company.
The high property prices are messing up lives of young people who don't have rich parents. In my friend circle, I can see it as a key source of strife among married couples. Buying a house ties you to a city .. even if you get a better offer some place else. I don't think real-estate is being recognized as the beast it is. The last Bank of Canada rate decrease seemed only about oil prices and oblivious to the flames in YVR and YYZ housing.
Sigh ... what a mess :(
I now work at Google in Kitchener, and commute from a hobby farm near Hamilton. Quality of life is outstanding. I dread ever having to work in Toronto proper again.
The startup scene in Toronto is a clique. The quality of management talent is sad. After working as employee #4 in a Toronto startup, I jumped ship to work for a late stage startup HQ'd in NYC and the contrast in their management skills and treatment of employees was night and day. Working at a 'hip' company in Toronto they expect you to feel blessed and to take intense sacrifice on their behalf just because you have the privilege of working for something that isn't a bank or insurance company. Meanwhile compensation lags significantly behind what you'd get elsewhere in NA.
And then the rest of the non-startup scene in Toronto is primarily large financial companies, and the work is soul crushingly boring.
In any event, I think for the first time there's a really good cohort of Toronto founders with American-style vision and ability to execute. I don't think we're too far from seeing a couple of unicorns in Toronto that will help to build a stronger ecosystem. And yes, where necessary that means importing American management at great expense.
Toronto has a lot going for it. It's not everyone's cup of tea, as you can attest, but I think it's as good a place as anything to do something great.
In general it seems like VC-funded companies that go through acquisition here get a far weaker deal than similar companies in the US. And the employees a lesser share of the pie. Maybe that's changing now, but unless the capital is there to invest, I can't see how.
We can always whine about how things in Canada are never as good as in <x>, in this case the Valley, but overall it's actually pretty good. I guess the secret sauce is to just get on with doing what you'd do regardless of your circumstances. I personally am not motivated by whether or not I'd get a 30% boost on an eventual exit if we were in the US.
Having said that, I have references that Wattpad in Toronto is a great place to work. I believe that every place is quite unique and there are diamonds to be found amongst the rough.
https://angel.co/shopify/jobs/88003-software-developer?utm_s...
And it goes up from there, especially once you start looking at positions that include less sexy startups, less common technologies, or more responsibility (like being a team lead).
Just saying, average house price in Toronto is 1 million. It should not cost 10x a dev's income to buy a house in Richmond Hill. In the Bay area, total comp of 400K is not unreasonable ... that makes the 2.5 million dollar homes in MV seem reasonable ... an uncomfortable 6.25x of a dev's income.
I don't think Shopify being in town has anything to do with that, just that the ceiling is higher than you may think.
If you're young and childless, it really doesn't.
Why would you do this? There's been nothing but talk about a housing bubble, especially in Vancouver and Toronto. This seems like the worst possible time to buy property there, especially if you take any debt to do it.
I doubt it's very much, and they've got major downside risk.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/article26200269.ece/...
I'm estimating since the chart isn't precise. It looks like, from 2013, the average change is:
single family home: 1.1 million --> 1.4 million = 8.37% return
condo: Hard to tell. Not as large.
Am I reading that chart right? Of course, that doesn't tell you the increase in price in existing homes. And that return rate comes with interest, fees, property taxes, maintenance and the massive downside risk if we're in a bubble.
This is a very rough calculation on my part, so let me know if it's wrong.
That said, as to the original question, which was whether someone should invest now: With the massive economic slowdown + the large drop in Calgary real estate prices, this seems like a particularly bad time to invest, even if it might theoretically have been better a few years ago.
It's not really better than the inexpensive healthcare that comes with any good job in the US. If your choice is between $70K with free healthcare, and $120K with inexpensive healthcare, I know which I would pick.
If you listened to people talk, Alberta's oil sector was supporting the whole economy. Snarky message board comments from people from out west (where I'm from originally, BTW) making comments about Ontario being a "have-not" province being propped up by the superior entrepreneurial hard-working western oil sector.
Meanwhile through all of this as a % of GDP, exports in manufacturing were _still_ triple those of oil and gas. Ontario's beleaguered auto-sector was still the primary export in the country. Followed by agriculture and other sectors.
I said it at the time, and now it is obvious. They were lying through ideological teeth, and telling a story to the country about resource driven prosperity which was factually incorrect. And it has led to our country as a whole inheriting many of the problems Alberta as a province has been plagued with for decades: highly cyclical, with a political culture verging on corrupt, and environmentally dirty dirty dirty.
And I'm afraid the new gov't is only half-heartedly interested in remedying any of this.
Ontario and Quebec could be the "Germany of North America"; the deliberate assassination of our manufacturing and engineering sectors by everyone from federal gov't officials to fund managers has been disgusting. We have a heavy infrastructure debt, are saddled by decades of ideologically-driven mismanagement, and an ineptitude at actually getting anything done.
That's because Ontario's government managed to drive out most industry with an energy policy that created high and unstable electricity prices.
As a result Ontario became a receiver of federal equalization payments for the first time ever.
That's what the jokes were about.
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/03/30/money_s...
Please avoid implying that the post you are replying to is a shill unless you have good evidence to that effect. Even well-supported ad hominiem attacks rarely discredit the substance of a post, and your ad-hominem attack is unsupported by any evidence. You also failed to reply to what the post above you actually said, which was that Ontario was doing worse now than ever before (relative to the other provinces).
In addition, I don't think this post follows the spirit of the Hacker News guidelines.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
That I pointed out that the Fraser institute has made political hay out of the fact that Ontario has received subsidies is completely legitimate. They have been by far the organization that has boosted this line the most. They are a highly partisan ideological organization that in general gets way more uncritical press than they should.
In a way, all stories about resource driven prosperity are incorrect. Natural resources are exported and so is the wealth they bring. You never hear about the prosperity of mining towns because they never have any, and when the resources run out they don't have jobs either.
If the government invested all that money in small to middle sized local companies instead the province would be so much more prosperous. Right now, profits are our biggest export. Not only that but the government insists on propping up big, mismanaged companies like CAE and bombardier time and time again [2] instead of investing in startups.
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/how-far-wi... [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mark-milke/bombardier-corporate...
It seems like Canada is prone to buying into extremism. Be it separatism or the recent love-affair with Putinist style economics banking soley on oil/gas and expecting there never to be a shake-up in the market when clearly the industrialized West was going full tilt into renewables.
It's ridiculous when people (not Quebeckers) can't get a job in Quebec, then they go to other provinces and get a job quickly.
This is something I've seen from close
Not to mention the big gap between provinces, it seems they're more apart than US states
Thanks to that bill, you had a population of professionals who had moved to Montreal for good jobs who found that, because they were born in a different province, their children could not be educated in English. These professionals found it less painful to move to Toronto and find new jobs than they did to watch their children be forced into schools that didn't speak their language. Companies found that it was cheaper to relocate headquarters than to lose these employees, and this accelerated the brain drain.
Quebec continues to be hostile to anglophone immigration, but most of the damage is now done and permanent.
It's all about bilingualism. As someone who learned french from birth, I could not work in tech if I couldn't also communicate in english. That's a requirement for most jobs and I had to work really hard to get a good level of spoken english.
We have people that speak french and spanish, french and english, french and german, etc.
Bilingualism is strong here, pick it up if you want to work in the area. It's no different for people born in Québec. We learn french at home and then work really hard to learn english for work.
I am a Canadian anglophone from British Columbia with highschool French. My children have been raised in the USA with no French. It would be easier for me to take a job and move my family to The Netherlands than to Montreal. (Not a hypothetical example. I turned down an offer a few years ago at a company that wanted to hire me there. My children would have had to learn Dutch, but would have gone to school in English.)
If you are founding a company and want access to anglophone talent, would you prefer to start it in Montreal or Amsterdam? What are the economic implications of this fact for Quebec?
Quebec has made a decision to value remaining French above economic growth. That's somewhat reasonable. But if you've chosen that, you should be honest with yourselves about the choice you made. And shouldn't be puzzled that your economy has not done so well.
You could argue that some laws make no sense and I would agree on some points but people are very afraid to lose what makes Québec what it is and some harsh measures are put in place.
I believe that you should either make the decision with full awareness of consequences, or else make the opposite decision. But don't make the decision and then be dishonest about what the consequences were.
or I could work anywhere else in Canada or the US and not have to.
There is a strong wish to stay true to our cultural heritage and stay true to our endangered roots as French Canadians. Québec has been fighting pressure to abandon the french language for ages. This is why we have things such as the "Loi 101" and the "Charte de la langue française". It makes sure that people can go in a coffee and order in french without any problems.
You would think this is a non-issue, why force people to speak and write french? It's easy to think that because most of the province is french business and strangers are is going to standardize to french but it's not true. Even with the laws that we have in place, there are a lot of shops or restaurants where they can only offer service in english. It's a constant uphill battle and while some laws make no sense, it's better than having no laws or regulations.
Yes, it is very hard to come and live in Québec if you are not willing to put time and effort to learn french. That's exactly the way we want it.
Sometimes the province is seen as racist and backward from the outside. The truth is that we are a very welcoming people but only to those who acknowledge and try to understand our cultural heritage and the fight that is being fought to stay true to our values despite all the pressure to change.
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric someone from the American south would say about fighting gay marriage or keeping blacks out of their neighborhoods. Yet when it comes to the terrible policies of francophiles, we're supposed to pretend this rhetoric is valid?
Not a single company I interviewed with was willing to even come close to US salaries. Everyone I know from school who's any good at all has already left for SF/Seattle/NYC and I'll probably be joining them soon.
I'm not sure how these Canadian companies expect to retain great talent when just across the border, developers can make more money after deducting all living expenses + taxes, than the entire pre-tax salary they're offering.
I actually get paid more here in Toronto than I could hope to get in London.
My only option for the US is H1B but I'm willing to stick around for a while and I'll consider my options when I'm Canadian.
[1] - https://medium.com/@benjilanyado/an-open-letter-to-ed-vaizey...
I myself have no motivation to move to the USA. The increase in salary would be accompanied by a personal (stress on the personal aspect) loss in quality of life. Overall motivations for me staying in the Netherlands are cultural (the mindsets of Europeans are far closer to my own), environmental (sane cycling routes, pedestrian accessible city centers, high quality public transport), and ease of travel to a variety of interesting holiday locations. The difference between Canada and the US is not even close to the difference between Canada and the Netherlands, so you can infer my willingness to move home to small town Nova Scotia. If you cannot compete on salaries you have to compete on something else but what is that going to be? Universal health care and high quality public education are not unique to Canada and probably not the highest interest of people we are considering.
How exactly is anyone helped by money taking a round trip through the government rather than the same thing happening through free markets? You've made the cycle slower, you've made the recipients dependent on government bureaucratic decisions (who are not well-incentivized to decide well), and have reduced incentives for efficiency. And you've gained nothing.
Don't get me wrong. Government has important roles to play in our economy and society. We need government to create basic infrastructure, create regulations encouraging public goods, provide a stable system of law, and so on. But unless you are serving some legitimate purpose, channeling daily economic activity through the government is a net loss compared to doing the same through private enterprise.
Quebec being full of people who believe that the economy should go through the government seems to be its second largest economic mistake, and one it is still making on a large scale. People like you complain about the predictable results of this mistake, but don't see that it is a mistake.
Quebec's largest mistake was, of course, Bill 101. That made your province so hostile to anglophones that 1/3 of them "voluntarily emmigrated" within a few years. (The ones I know are inclined to dispute how voluntary that emmigration was...) They took with them the headquarters of many major companies, the associated jobs, and the general economic activity that would have come from those professionals spending locally. This is why, for example, The Bank of Montreal is now headquartered in Toronto.
There is a collective blind spot in Quebec to the true cost of this for your society. Major companies need to have a stream of professionals moving to their headquarters from elsewhere because that is how you move up in the hierarchy. If you have made professionals unwilling to move to Quebec (for instance by forcing their children to receive education in a language they don't speak), companies have to choose between moving headquarters or losing their most valued employees to competitors.
It proved to be cheaper to move headquarters. And they did. Quebec's economy has never recovered from this. (Though you did adjust your ethnic ratio by enough that you nearly managed to get a 50% vote to secede in the 90s...)
My impression is that if you lowered the income tax in Quebec (much higher then Ontario), most probably more professionals would be willing to work there, english or french or any other language.
I agree with your statement of "Quebec being full of people who believe that the economy should go through the government".
Nope. The almost won referendum was in 1995. The referendum that wasn't close was 1980. Bill 101 was 1977.
The Bank of Montreal announced its move in 1977.
(I'm aware of this because I had several classmates in high school whose families had moved from Quebec. They were extremely clear that they moved because of Bill 101, not because of the referendum.)
But after a year living there I left - 100% due to the hostility to strictly English-speaking people.
I hoped my lack of french-speaking ability would only be a minor hurdle that I could slowly overcome as I grasped the language over the years. But every single store you go into requires that they start speaking in french first (a bylaw). I watched three major street protests while walking downtown against stores who didn't change their globally-recognized retail brand names to french versions.
Plus I felt a large cliquey nature to the Montreal tech scene. I felt like a foreigner in my own country. I was happy to go back to Toronto where multiculturalism is actually fully embraced. Where almost everyone still speaks their native language first, often remaining in cultural divided in neighbourhoods, and despite this mixing at bars and events is never an uncomfortable experience.
Quebec's greatest economic problem is their obsession with cultural homogeneity.
I'm curious what changed?
I always thought Quebec's problem were with the it's socialist approach and how taxed Quebecers are, thus professionals flocked away, but your experience has made me realize a different reality. I guess we aren't as welcoming if you're not french ... ?
Or feeling the hostility of older Quebecers who think I'm just another anglophile who didn't spend the time to learn their language. I heard many people casually complain about the American kids who came to the universities and never tried to speak french.
Before arriving I heard lots of rumours about how Quebec people aren't friendly and I was quick to ignore this as a stereotype. But going to many tech events I found it difficult to network. The image that has stuck in my mind of these occasions is finding many small tightnit groups of people packed together at bars or venues, who seemed to have known each other for years, and seemingly disinterested in the people around them.
I never experienced that in Toronto or SF.
> I always thought Quebec's problem were with the it's socialist approach and how taxed Quebecers are
Bringing up Quebec in Toronto (which came up often moving there) the first thing people talk about is the people's attitudes, not socalism. I've actually never heard people talk about their socialist tendencies outside of the news. The only political stereotype that came up was that the tendency of Quebec people to complain about the government not giving them enough money/support, while simultaneously not contributing as much as Ontario economically.
That said, Montréal is a great city and I'm actually considering moving back, despite the dramatic drop in income.
No, no, Quebec's largest mistake was accepting confederation. If we'd just joined up with the Americans instead, and batter down all laws protecting our culture and laguage, we would have gotten assimilated anyway, but at least we'd have a stronger economy.
Also, we wouldn't have to deal with the RoC...
That said it is worth reflecting that most of the natural resources that Quebec has is on land that was added post-Confederation.
Quebec received control of that land under a number of requirements, including that they take care of the natives. The natives do not believe that this requirement has been met, which is why for example the Cree voted over 95% for seceding from Quebec if Quebec seceded from Canada, by force if necessary. While the Quebecois were mixed on whether to secede, they had very strong opinions that Quebec was an indivisible whole. Including land given post-Confederation.
It would have been interesting to see what would have happened with this land if the 1995 referendum had gone through. I'm quite sure that nobody outside of Quebec would have agreed with the reasoning that "Canada is divisible but Quebec is not". So how would Canada have handled the question of how to handle the economically valuable parts of Quebec that wanted back into Canada?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Quebec for more on this.
This more an anecdote than an argument, but I know quite a few people who can barely pay their mortgage or have crazy margin debt (with mortgage) in Canada. I doubt their situation will get any better soon. There is this mentality around here that owning a house is a must or you are some kind of loser.
In Edmonton and Calgary I can echo that there is a strong social influence in buying real estate. Owning a home is expected. With homes appreciating over 9%/year for 10 years, people assume that that will continue into the distant future.
I can live with lower pay but after years of nothing but female rejection I'm really tempted to run to the US just for this reason. (Again, only anecdotally, but the way I'm treated by women in social settings is night vs day anywhere but Toronto.)
all i can say is, don't expect different results if you keep doing the same things. it's on you to produce the outcomes you want in your life.
I know the places you're talking about, and I can't stand them because they're dehumanizing and hypocritical. But believe me I've looked, and in my experience a disproportionate number of these men are actually from Toronto! I'm not saying men don't feel like this elsewhere, but it was surprising to me how this city sticks out.
http://www.returnofkings.com/58796/15-reasons-why-toronto-is...
(Edit: I don't endorse the above article, it's demeaning and ridiculous, but I'm using it as an example of how this city often comes up in "worst of" discussions.)
I think you'll find that those things grease the wheels of conversation basically everywhere
Signed, Someone from Houston, Tx
I grew up in Alberta. It is cold and dry and has a short summer. I prefer the weather here even if the summers can be a bit too humid and hot for me.
But aside from that it's a great place to live. Land is cheap, you can get good local food anywhere, and we're safe from nearly every natural disaster you can think of. Just bring a jacket.
In reality the bulk of the nastiest storms here in Ontario come over the lakes from northern Michigan, which is, yes, north of us. Look on a map, most of the heavily populated areas of Canada are as far south as northern California. The parts that are north of the 49th are much less populated.
Yes, periodically there is a nasty cold front coming down from Hudson's bay, but the prevailing winds and weather patterns are west to east. So most of our weather blows over from the midwest U.S.
The really nasty awful cold weather last year for example, hit the U.S. midwest harder and nastier first.
So, yup, we tend to refer to snow and cold as coming from Canada.
Unlike Houston, where it's crazy hot and humid all the time, and there's nothing you can do about it except for hide inside in the air conditioning.
No, the problem with Canada recently has been that it's been too warm. It's hard to really appreciate winter if it's too warm to go skiing or skating. We got close to an inch of rain on Sunday here in Ottawa that really messed up our snow. :(
I'll take the weather in pretty much anywhere in Canada over the weather in Houston any day.
I will complain about the lack of sunshine in the wintertime here, though. That's just depressing.
It's 65 and sunny in Houston today, it's 16 and snowing in Ottawa.
There's little snow, and we get tons of sunshine. When it does get cold, it's dry, so it doesn't feel as bad as a warmer temp on the coasts. You get reprieves in the form of chinooks too, where the temperature will jump up 20 degrees for a week or two. It's above freezing here today, but it was at -20C on Friday.
There is a tech scene here as well, and it's starting to get a bit more traction now that oil and gas aren't eating up all the brain power. Getty Images has offices here, and there are start-ups in and out of the energy industry. It'll be interesting to see what the city looks like in 10 years. Lots of folks are calling for it to be the next Detroit, but it doesn't really seem to be going that way.
I left Toronto 8 years ago for the US but have close ties to home and keep regular tabs on the labour market. Even at 1:1 CAD:USD, before factoring in increased cost of living in Toronto (vs. where I am, which is not SF), I'm making close to double what I'd hope to fetch back home. If I really bust my ass and kill it where I am, the disparity is only going to grow.
Once you account for other factors like the increased cost of everything and the general rarity of high-paying tech jobs, returning to Toronto feels like too much of a risk: even if I were to strike relative "gold" and make $120k-140k+ CAD as a senior engineer (a far cry from what I get how), what happens when I move on to something else? A close, highly-talented friend of mine has one of those jobs but feels trapped and doesn't even know where else he could go.
I love that the Toronto startup scene is growing and maturing and I have friends who are really working to, but I fear what's going to happen when funding in the US begins to contract. SF, NYC, and Seattle all have profitable "anchor" employers which will continue to bid for talent even when startup funding won't sustain high tech salaries. Toronto has small branch offices of American companies and some banks (I'm skeptical about the latter). Is there much else?
As far as I can tell there just isn't as much good work. I want to go home some day, but as someone who was fortunate enough to land a good tech job in the US: returning is a massive step down in pay for: fewer choices of work, a more fleeting labour market, a less ambitious environment, an expensive city with overpriced real estate, and a public transit/commute crisis which might not get materially better before I retire. I really do love the place though.
tl;dr I'm an exceptionally fortunate Canadian spoiled by great career prospects in a major American tech hub and find it hard to justify returning home :(
I think its largely cultural. Theoretically Canada should be more welcoming to entrepreneurship. You don't have to worry about your health insurance when you quit and start your own company - and the safety net limits your fall in the case of failure. The government also heavily subsidizes new startups.
But entrepreneurship is generally looked down upon in a way that isn't true in America. A failed startup in the US is chalked to "at least you tried" whereas in Canada its looked upon as a moral tale of the risks of chasing childish dreams. This goes throughout society - from raising capital to what your in-laws hassle you about over the dinner table.
I know a few others with cross border operations and they're also shifting towards US markets.
I noticed product sales to Canadians also dried up, as my products are now 40% more expensive.
Canada has what's known as Dutch disease. When the loonie is strong the natural resource sector booms since they get more value in return for selling these assets, however the services and manufacturing sector tend to fall off a cliff since labour cost become too high.
Historically the Ontario govt has banked on this cycle. When the loonie rises and Ontario crashes then govt spending increases to compensate. When the loonie crashes and employment increases, tax revenue increases and then they payoff the debt from the crash. Ditto can be said for Alberta using the opposite scenario.
The federal tax transfer system adds additional funding mechanics to level the playing field between provinces.
That all said, everything has become very different. Oil has crashed due to external forces and the loonie has crashed too. That's fine, but I think govt is trying to figure out why the manufacturing services sectors are not gaining traction as they historical would (which is because other countries are now more equipped to compete within Canada and are still much cheaper... Example Mexico has taken all the auto manufacturing work). At the same time housing prices are 30 to 50% overpriced and the energy sectors nose dive is not a typical down cycle, it's a long term structural change.
I'm probably wrong, but my spidey senses are telling me that Canada is going to go through a rough time and will continue to do so until the govt models these structural changes to compensate. If the Canadian govt jumps into a thoughtless spending spree (which is the current plan) using the old economic model then in 5 to 10 years Canadas outcome could be dire.
[Edit: removed "Greece 2.0" as it highlighted aspects that could not compare to Canada's circumstances.]
So Greece had no option to devalue it's currency in response to a slowing economy. Whereas Canada can devalue currency (as we're doing). We have the additional benefit that our debt load is in our domestic currency, so we don't face the debt appreciation challenge many countries face when they devalue their currency.
I think Canada's in trouble, but the Greek situation is fundamentally a different type of problem.
(I didn't downvote)
If you're a country with currency control + debt in your own currency, it's basically impossible to have that same kind of crisis.
(You can have other problems, but they wouldn't be so intractable as what Greece has.)
Same newspaper that endorsed Conservatives, whose economic policies for the past decade was to put oil sands above everything else, the government under which we saw Canada withdrawing from Kyoto and generally have terrible environmental record, is now having seconds thoughts when oil tanked as well as other commodities tanked dragging loonie with it.
Boo-hoo, sir, boo-hoo.
Refs: their endorsement -- http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/the-t...
The Globe has for the last 15 years at least been schizophrenic about which of these two camps it supports. Its editorial board is a little different from the rest of the content in the paper.
Many "rational economists" have made that statement. Even the head of the Bank of Canada himself has suggested it is regrettable that our currency is so tied to oil. He can't openly criticize gov policy and so that's about as close as Poloz can get to condemnation.
Classic hacker news comment. "I must disagree with whatever the post says and declare that no rational person could disagree with my criticism."
Anytime I see commentary that include words "rational," "logical," or the term "man of science" I know I'm at least dealing with someone reductionist, pedantic, and usually extremist or marginalized.
(yes I know the contradiction I just made)
That is even more of a "classic hacker news comment", in the bad sense, than the one you're objecting to. I've noticed that generalizations about HN in arguments always degrade the quality of the discussion. The trouble is that community members (on all sides of any divide) tend to extrapolate whatever they notice and dislike into an image of the community as a whole, which then resembles the image of their adversaries. This is bad for the community, especially because we have no face-to-face contact to mitigate it.
I don't mean to pick on your comment in particular. It's a pattern that comes up a lot when commenters diss the community.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10887769 and marked it off-topic.