Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

We had a gov't for 10 years full of "Calgary-school" (Canada's right-wing ultra free market economic ideologues coming out of the University of Calgary econ/poli-sci program). They were overwhelmingly driven by an oil and gas agenda. From the gov't down to mutual fund investors, everyone was treating our economy like a one-trick pony, all oil and gas.

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.

I'm from Quebec and I have to agree with you that it could easily be north america's Germany. There is a lot of very talented software developers in Montreal but a lot of them leave to get higher salaries or work for foreign companies that love the very low, government subsidized wages [1].

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...

I don't think Quebec gets a free pass here. It was once the financial capital of Canada until all this separatist talk. Toronto then became the financial capital of Canada, with something like 40% of its companies HQ'd there. Montreal now has about a third of the GDP of Toronto, yet Toronto only has 1m more people!

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.

I agree

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

Check the timeline. It wasn't separatism that drove companies out, it was Bill 101. (OK, Bill 101 was driven by the same motives as separatism.)

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.

I'm from Québec.

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.

Consider this.

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.

For a lot of people, it is more important to be strong in our values than to ignore them for the sake of the economy even if it means losing economical growth. For Québec to be strong it needs to be true to itself. Selling out our heritage for profit would be unthinkable.

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.

As I said, the decision is somewhat justifiable. But there are plenty of comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888145 which show no awareness of how policy actually translated into economic effects.

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.

> Bilingualism is strong here, pick it up if you want to work in the area

or I could work anywhere else in Canada or the US and not have to.

It's a complicated issue.

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.

>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?

As a non-Canadian software developer in Canada the brain-drain to the US via TN visas is strong. Most talented devs I have met in Canada are Americans that have left the US because of politics etc.

As a recent University of Waterloo grad, this has been my experience as well. I tried interviewing in Toronto/Vancouver for a while but have since given up in the Canadian job market.

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.

It's worse in London. I seen a rant on Medium [1] about the lack of affordable talent in London and I could only think of some of the low ball offers I received which would leave me worse off than staying in the North West.

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...

Thanks for that link, it was a good laugh. The dissonance with reality was strong there. A single look at indeed.co.uk will reveal nary a single 600£ daily rate even for senior developers. Best of luck getting a pay increase; hopefully you don't have to deal with the horror of the H1B process to get paid what should be the global rate for software developers.

I love the veiled language in that article - "a new generation of proto-programmers emerge to correct the market" - you mean you hope a bunch of cheap new blood comes in because you wont pay market rates? Yeah, ok.

I realize we're a lot better off here in Canada than in many other places around the world, but it's still baffling how ridiculously uncompetitive our salaries can be when the barrier to entry into the US is almost non-existent.

H1-B isn't exactly the only option. For example if you get a job with the Canadian branch of a multinational US company, after a year you can transfer to their US branch with an L1 visa.

True. L1 is actually better than TN because it's dual-intent and better than H1B because there's no cap.

I myself moved to the Netherlands from Canada and now hire people at salaries greater than my own at our branch in the US.

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.

If the government invested all that money in small to middle sized local companies instead the province would be so much more prosperous.

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...)

"Quebec's largest mistake was, of course, Bill 101" ... I thought it was the almost won referendum that drove this exile, not Bill 101.

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".

I thought it was the almost won referendum that drove this exile, not Bill 101.

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.)

I moved to Montreal from Toronto because of the great urban environment which I found (and still believe to be) superior to Toronto. The rents were cheap and salaries were lower, which made me believe running a startup there would be much easier. From the outside I wondered why everyone from Toronto wasn't moving there to build companies.

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.

Out of curiosity, when did you move away from Montréal? I would have agreed with you a few years ago, but things seem to have improved for anglophones as of late.

It was in 2010-2011.

I'm curious what changed?

I've noticed much less awkwardness and resentment when people are faced with non-French speakers in general - both in stores and with regular people. I'm not sure about how things are in the workplace these days, though.

I've never worked in Montreal, I'm from Northern Quebec, but I got to do university in Ontario and worked ever since in Ottawa. I got a job offer for a job in Toronto, and I really like the people and how being French-Canadian didn't seem like a barrier at all. Finally I declined for various reasons.

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 ... ?

It's the small things. Imagine having to apologize in every single store that you don't speak french well, even though you start the conversation speaking english or weak 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.

I am a naturalized Canadian. French is my first language, and I studied and lived in Montreal several years before moving to Toronto. I feel that Toronto, and Ontario in general, does a much better job at integrating immigrants and visible minorities, regardless of origin or native language, than Quebec. This is a huge factor if you want to attract talent in a global economy.

My marginal tax rate in NYC is not too far off from what it would be in Québec. My income as a not-quite-senior software engineer, however, is ~3.5x higher. Taxes would have to go down below zero for a move to make sense financially.

That said, Montréal is a great city and I'm actually considering moving back, despite the dramatic drop in income.

> Quebec's largest mistake was, of course, Bill 101.

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...

Going back farther, the USA fought a war to get you in 1812...

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.

> Ontario being a "have-not" province

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.

That's a good story that the Fraser institute made a lot of noise about, and made a great headline but in reality Ontario was still contributing more in tax revenues and EI contributions than it got in equalization payments:

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/03/30/money_s...

>"That's a good story that the Fraser institute made a lot of noise about"

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."

I didn't call the poster names or disparage them in any way. I posted an editorial that cited facts pointing out the inaccuracy of the claim that Ontario is a net subsidy recipient. Ontario's net contribution in taxes and EI payments outstrips any transfer payments it receives or has received.

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.

stop hurting Frasier's feefees, Tone Policing Guy below is getting an aneurysm...

Comments like this break the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all.

>a story to the country about resource driven prosperity which was factually incorrect

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.

Same for countries exporting agricultural produce. They can't tarrif imports to stimulate local economic development because of WTO & IMF. Kenya will be stuck growing flowers forever!

Oil and gas, conservative but also headed by (Harper) a pretty much far right religious attitude which pushed climate change denial and also anti-science in general.

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