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Comment by FT_intern | Hacker News Reader

Waterloo is best at bleeding great Canadian engineers to the USA

So does UofT - I myself and at least a dozen other 1T7 grads I know personally are headed south as soon as we graduate. This is a Canada-wide problem which won't be fixed unless salaries equalize.

Spot on. This new institute (and other govt efforts like it) all fail to answer this fundamental question - why would someone work at half the pay (or less) if they were a Canadian citizen? It is a chicken-and-egg problem .. salaries and labour pool quality go hand in hand.

Some of us enjoy living in a more equal society where people who are down on their luck still have the opportunity to afford healthcare and higher ed.

Equal society? Lets see you buy a detached house in Toronto if you are a first generation immigrant, and your parents are not loaded. If you do not own property today, I don't see a way to EVER afford it in Toronto. Our society is hell-bent on taxing income when we should really be taxing wealth. The latest budget is fairly against young people in favor of old people. But to each their own I guess.

I never said Canadian society is perfectly equal, just more equal than US society. Sure property distribution is a massive issue but that's the case in any urban centre. There's a lot of progress left to be made but that doesn't mean we should just give up and head south.

>Equal society

Conveniently, you chopped the word "more" off of "more equal society". Kind of unfair to argue against a point the person didn't make.

Thanks for having my back :)

Being able to buy a bit faster doesn't make up for how badly poverty is treated in America. I would argue, in fact, that although it may be harder for a tech worker to break into ownership in Canada, your family can still take advantage of the countless social programs that aren't available to all hardworking people in America :)

And there's more to Canada than Toronto. Montreal has great rent prices and a fun-loving tech scene, and a very unique culture. Quebec has $5 a day daycare, free healthcare for all, and McGill university which is ranked as one of the best research institutions in the world despite having the cheapest tuition in North America (although prices for non-residents are quite a bit higher).

Exactly. To invite people to stay here we need unicorn companies that young talent actually want to work for. I don't think this solves that problem as efficiently as possible. Would they be better giving that money to local startups in the space in hopes they become a unicorn and stay in Canada?

Till Canadian companies produce profits at US level, matching salaries seems like impossible. Same will be true for Europe also.

Because U of T engineers decide to stay in Toronto out of the goodness of their hearts...?

If an engineer stays in Canada it's certainly not because they're being adequately compensated.

Some of us would rather live in a country with better welfare even if we won't directly benefit from it. Compensation is good enough up here IMO.

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