Canada's aggressively merit based immigration policy has clear advantages in terms of allowing talent in. That said Canadian tech firms still pay way too little.
The Canadian tech sector doesn't make nearly as much money as their US counterpart does. The country has very few dedicated software companies, and none the caliber of the FAAMGs. For comparison, the largest software company in Canada by revenue earns $1.7B, Google is in the neighborhood of $120B a year.
Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Apple/etc are each individually orders of magnitude larger than the entire Canadian software industry combined. Chances are, that most metro areas in the US have a technology company larger than the biggest Canadian tech companies.
If Canada went from having a billion dollar tech sector to having a trillion dollar one, then salaries for engineers would explode.
We just need one of those companies to get fed up and move their HQ north. Canada's tech sector would double overnight.
I can even see that happening if the next couple US elections go the wrong way.
Add to that less friction around growing this workforce by bringing in new talent from abroad and it seems like a slam dunk.
You also need to actually be in Canada all those days. Any day that you're outside delays your citizenship by a day.
Then it takes about a year to process your citizenship application.
Overall, it's still much faster than most anywhere else.
I think it's more like every day that you are physically present in Canada pre-PR counts as 0.5 days. There's no such thing as a "tourist" under Canadian immigration law: you get a temporary resident visa/status/permit for your temporary "tourist" visits.
I think the part-day test applies (if you arrive in Canada at 10PM, even though you were only present for 2 hours, it counts as a half day).