Making the case for a homegrown Canadian semiconductor industry
financialpost.com
financialpost.com
Longterm commitment to plans.
It makes no sense to support projects short term, only then to hand the developed fruits of labour over to those capable to longterm commit to development. This is also the most valuable trait a government can bring to the market, as it is a system usually optimized for exploring local optima, but incapable to traverse the ridges of the research landscape by itself to new "hunting grounds".
In germany, a semi-conductor industry was existing and was given up, as further development would have needed propping up by government. Solar was developed and then fed to the wulfes locally, as entrenched energy providers sabotaged the support the young industry would have needed against chinas cheap manufacturing. And this pattern has played itself out over and over in western markets.
Shortsighted entrenched interests sabotage "new Players" who venture to those capable to commit.
So even, if at this moment, all parties agree to commitment, how longterm will this commitment be. Why should someone migrate from Taiwan to Canada, only to participate in a re-enactment of a short term "desert-flowering" of a chip industry?
Nobody would try to make a career on such shifting grounds. You cant built a cathedral on sand.
I appreciate the strategic concerns. However, the obvious benefit of a foreign nation subsidizing your consumption shouldn't be overlooked. Some of the knee-jerk reactions to central planning suggest that the western nations should emulate the CCP's statist system.
To be sure there are pragmatic concerns, but more concerning is the race to the bottom of top down planning this creates. Government bureaus will always find a rationale to expand purview of the state.
Specifically, if photovoltaic solar isn't cost effective without subsidies, then why use it?
When the state chooses winners and losers, it distorts the incentive based progression of technology. By narrowly focusing on artificially profitable PV solar, more efficient innovations may be overlooked.
There's always an unseen cost when central planners misallocate resources away from profitable industries. Pragmatists' best case might be that strategic concerns outweigh the losses of productivity and employment.
It is easiest when a new optimum is easy to reach by just following the gradient. Short-term thinking works well here.
There may be some optima much farther down, which take a lot of "buried" investment to reach: efficient photovoltaics, electric cars, reusable space launch systems, maybe even fusion power. We know that some of them are better optima than the previous state, because they have been reached. Some, like fusion power, haven't been, but there is a lot of hope that they'll work. Some other attempts, like supersonic passenger aircraft, ended up not as optimal as their proponents had hoped. You never know.
The problem is that you can only reach these distant goals by concentrating resources and spending them without an apparent commercial result for years and decades. This takes a high concentration of resources and a commitment. Currently only billionaires and certain national governments can afford that. Most public companies are too beholden to their quarterly results to follow long-term policies which do not bring steady profits along the way, and many governments are in the same situation because the voters do not care about long-term goals enough.
If the democracies ever bring out the brass knuckles and try hard they'll probably succeed. Even mild tweaks like loosening IP protections and letting failed financial institutions go bankrupt once in a while would do wonders.
But the political will is focused on, eg, the Green movement (and Germany is one of the world-wide leaders there) which sees it as essential to our survival that we replace cheap energy with clean energy. Now I'm sure a lot of readers believe in that as a goal but industry would rather go where the cheap energy is.
The English speaking democracies have spent years deprioritising industrial reform in favour of improving welfare and supporting environmental initiatives at the expense of industrial competition. These are widely supported policies and fair enough, it is great to live in the west. But the long term effect of this is easy to anticipate - challengers will find it easier to compete.
We aren't quite at the storage tipping point, but there is good reason to believe we will get there.
Solar as generation tipped years ago.
Make plans like energy in 2030 will be cheaper than it is now, not more expensive.
The brain drain is endless. If this project took off, our leaders would roll over in a second to sell it off, it's the proud tradition here.
The project was genuinely ground-breaking. Avro’s engineers had been allowed to build a record-breaker without compromise. But Canadians would soon discover that the supersonic age had made aviation projects so expensive that only a handful of countries could carry them out – and Canada, unfortunately, wasn’t one of them.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200615-the-record-break...
It was made to counter a hypothetical supersonic bomber that the soviets never built. Sputnik made them obsolete!
Even if one wished to settle in Vancouver for example, one would still be better off working down south for 5-10 years to save up for a nice house or apartment but by then all your friends are down there so you may as well stay.
https://financialpost.com/news/economy/virtual-brain-drain-p...
All I can say is, if you own a company in Canada, you need to work on interesting problems and pay well. Then, you will have your pick of top quality talent. If you are having trouble getting staff, you probably need to about double your salaries.
I interview with CAD companies from time to time and make a point of stating salary/equity requirements on par with the leading global market. Once they match, I'll be back.
Nobody is serious about being competitive, it's all about trying to keep trudging along with whatever people are stuck here. All the talk about investing in tech and so on is just hot air.
120k is about as high as I've seen, unless you're an oil exec or a hockey player.
By comparison my middle-of-the-road IT guy salary was 140k USD (like 180k CAD), and the high-end coder pay has no comparison (save for those exec or hockey types).
Meanwhile as a Canadian you probably speak N. American English, and have a strongly similar cultural background to the US -- easy to integrate -- have access to good, cheap University education, and have access to the NAFTA TN visa, which gets you across the border quickly. Is it really a surprise?
The worst part is how little stock companies are willing to give out. I had one company offer 6k over 4 years, which really puzzled me. Had another company try to sell me on how amazing their 30k/4 years package was (on a lower salary).
It would make sense if the cost of living were lower but it isn’t. Rents and home prices are very high. Tech jobs in lower cost of living places in the US like Kentucky or Michigan often pay much higher than Canadian tech jobs.
On top of that, the American tech industry has a huge number of both existing companies and new startups entering the picture due to the entrepreneurial culture and VC funding infrastructure.
As a result, the job market in the US is more competitive for talent, whereas Canadian applicants have fewer companies to choose from if they don't want to leave the country, and therefore less leverage for salary.
* Hard emphasis and lobbying by oil and resource extraction groups to continue the focus on resource extraction -- aka "the resource curse" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
* Higher taxes. Why pay you 150k when the gum'mnt (fed + provincial) is just gonna take 57%? Might as well just pay you 90k and then throw bennies or a company car. Also means that the money that the consumer would spend is now going to government use.
Canada's deficit is among the worst of all relevant countries at the moment.
By the way, your graph only shows the data for Canada. I guess the rest of the countries are irrelevant?
Per capita, our debt is comparable to the US
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/debt-to-gdp-continues-to-ri...
Edit: Google “libya petrodollar gold”
>However, by 1971, convertibility into gold was no longer viable as America's gold resources drained away. Instead, the dollar became a pure fiat currency (decoupled from any physical store of value), until the Petrodollar Agreement was concluded by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973.
The essence of the deal was that the U.S. would agree to military sales and defence of Saudi Arabia in return for all oil trade being denominated in U.S. Dollars. A secondary option to this agreement is the purchase of U.S. debt securities with surplus oil proceeds. By 1975, all OPEC nations agreed to price their oil supplies exclusively in U.S. Dollars and to hold their oil proceeds in U.S. government debt securities.
https://www.sandstoneam.com/insight/rise-of-the-petrodollar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_recycling#Petrodol...
An army can help that by signaling the stability of the country. An army alone does not do the job though, the real value lies in the trust and organization of the society itself. The more of that there is, the more others will believe the currency will be able to buy something they want, since organized societies with high trust are able to produce desirable things.
A secondary concern an army helps with is enforcing laws and preventing fraud, such as counterfeiting. If you know the US is not going to let some other tribe or country counterfeit their country, and has the capability to stop them, it helps you trust the currency more.
Obviously, the armed forces aren’t directly involved in the first few layers of conflict, but it’s always advantageous to have the ability to park an aircraft carrier fleet off someone’s coast during negotiations.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/sea-power-us-navy-and-forei...
We (USA) are totally the child of Britain. And we will probably be slowly phased out of relevance in a similar way.
Without that deficit you would have or a fall in GDP or an increase in private debt (that it's a lot worst than public debt).
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS9nP-BKa3M
(Stony Brook University, Presidential Lecture Series: Stephanie Kelton)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/chartimage?uri=/economy/governmentpub...
The EU average is about the same as Canada at 13.7% of GDP. The UK is up at 19.2%. If anything, I would think that Canada's 2020 deficit is pretty typical of developed countries.
Trudeau did absolutely nothing for the industry and immediately bowed down to Trump after he slapped tariffs later judged to be illegal. Well, not exactly, there was whining and a vague threat to switch an order of fighter jets from Boeing to Lockheed. Couldn't inject a little bit of capital at the right time. Airbus swooped in and bought the whole thing at a heavy discount.
Engineering shipped to France and manufacturing to Alabama.
And now Canadians expects a big investment in semi-conductor for highly experimental fabs?
This stuff seriously concerns me because apart from natural resources, we have very little to leverage. I worry for my kids and their kids. Canada is in a very precarious economic and political position from my perspective.
Could easily see Canada become the agricultural leader of North America.
The agricultural leaders of <anything> are countries that are nearly universally dirt-poor.
Agriculture is a small fraction of what IL produces.
(Not just now, but also historically.)
In any case, have a look at https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-dutch-economy-in-the-golden-...
Agriculture has been important for the Dutch for a long, long time.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... which arguably allowed Britain to become the wealthiest place on the planet for a while.
Who is we?
As long as there's favorable compensation and tax policies on the US side, Canada's brightest, healthiest, and wealthiest will just hop over to benefit from the more favorable conditions there after reaping the expensive taxpayer funded social benefits (healthy upbringing, affordable higher education).
The bulk of Canadian taxes are paid by the "brightest, healthiest and wealthiest" [0], so the expensive social benefits Canadians enjoy are largely funded by extracting taxes from these people, not the other way around.
Thus, I can hardly blame them for moving to a place where they don't have to subsidize others as much.
[0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=111000...
According to your link, the top 10% of Canadians pay about 50% of the taxes in Canada. In the US, the top 10% pay a larger share: 70% (although this is only federal data).[1]
So moving to the US to avoid subsidizing others is probably not the best rationale.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/summary-of-the-latest-federal-inco...
A 90th percentile American in Washington right across the boarder would make $125k and pay 24.53% to taxes.
We can compare NY to Quebec where at $125k/$100k respectively Quebec has a slight tax advantage (33.65%NY vs 32.70%QC) that goes back in favor of NY with +$20k (34.48%NY vs 35.43%QC).
Ontario fares better though. Maybe that's the cause of the US rust belt.
Nevermind that if you're 90th percentile of California or NY, you'd be making near $300k. So your tax rate might be 10% higher, but your take home is easily triple of what you'd have if you stayed in Canada.
That would seem to be a more realistic and mutually beneficial economic arrangement than expecting people to ignore an opportunity to make substantially more lifetime income out of allegiance to their birth country. We stole one in Ohio, she even married into the family. Her parents are absolutely amazing folks, just saw them on their way back from wintering in Florida (where they were actually able to get vaccinated, unlike back home where nobody is vaccinated and the cops are facetiming neighbors to make sure there are no visitors.)
Maybe Canada can stabilize as an incubator for cool people and recoup those expenses through the impact they have on the world.
The US is the only country anyone cares about that taxes their expats.
It's generally considered one of the worst aspects of the American tax system.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_American#Taxation_o...
Regarding the US and Canada, there are NAFTA cross-border tax rules which are complex and annoying, but not especially onerous in terms of tax obligations.
Those people still have the hassle of having to declare American taxes, without generating any revenue for the fisc. That's a pure deadweight loss, if there ever was one.
I see this repeated often on the web, but I hate this saying. I work in engineering. I'm surrounded by bright individuals, both fresh and experienced. Saying the brightest people leave Canada implies only the dumb and at most the mediocre remain in Canada, which I find not only offensive, but also not matching the reality.
Our Principle Engineer at my last gig did like ~10 years around the DC area and then pissed off back to Calgary to raise kids and settle down. Still works remotely for the said US gig.
Plus have you ever been through a winter where it dips to -40C? Fuck that noise. I'm from the south and live in Canada and never though I'd miss bitter VA winters...
Yes. I live in Calgary.
They didn't win https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bombardier-boeing-tariffs-1...
(a) The amount of money funnelled into Bomardier was a lot, and BBD was/is IMHO not much more than a personal piggy back for the founding family who still runs thing. The two-class shares are crazy and should have been eliminated in any one of multiple bailouts that the company received over the years/decades.
(b) Canada has put retaliatory tariffs on all sorts of products when the US has acted in a silly fashion (and not just under Trump): it doesn't do much because of the relative sizes of the two countries.