Canada’s new tech talent strategy
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Net migration is probably pretty high in Canada right now and will increase once people figure out that there is not enough density or proper housing for them.
Check out these two top threads thread at canadahousing subreddit:
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/onta...
I am waiting to see what the cabinet shuffle looks like, but we are probably going to run some billboard campaigns or do some fundraising soon to address the housing crisis if the government is not tackling this properly. If you are Canadian or have interest in this space on addressing these social issues, hit me up.
Software developers are used to paying sub-10% income tax there (or no tax at all).
Software developers are not allowed to leave Ukraine.
Why wouldn't they be able to leave?
They meant to say "Men of conscription age, hence most software developers ..."
You need something more attention grabbing. Something Titan-like that the media will run with for days. Something like what started the Arab spring or similar movements. Not advocating for self-immolation, but it has to be dramatic enough to wake people up.
There are too many incumbents benefiting from the status quo that it’ll take a monumental effort to turn things around.
Chow would probably be at the front of any Arab Spring type protest in Toronto championing housing.
Yet her whole website is the same shit we've been sold as solutions since the 1970s: city wide rent control that has repeatedly resulted in a long term reduction in housing supply, a small set of new gov built skyscrapers that will take a decade to build and come in at twice the cost of budget, doubling down on disincentivizing renting properties by 2xing the amount of legal worries property renters have to go through when dealing with bad tenants, some weak stuff about city spending $100M to buy homes off the market so they don't get renovated (so basically 10 homes), etc, etc.
https://www.oliviachow.ca/plan
Is the NDP the party of the wealthy elite in Toronto? Over valuing protecting a small amount of exclusive neighbourhoods with old Victorian homes at the expense of the rest of the (very large and varied) city and only ever allowing expensive skyscrapers to be built?
The answer to that might be yes. But it's hard to disconnect those critiques from the language and policies of municipal politics here in Toronto... and almost every major western city. Which always sounds the same, while conventiently blaming someone else.
Always has been.
I have no idea what you're complaining about. All of the policies you want are what she is promising. And has done.
She made it so that you can now build four story, four unit multiplexes. It's right there on the website you linked. This already happened a few months ago.
And she says "Olivia would streamline, coordinate and simplify the approval process for housing so we can get more built, faster."
And she wants to put a wealth tax on those expensive homes you don't like.
You can complain that the city could move faster. But, all of the things you want are what she is doing.
Those are generic sentences without substance. Of course the city wants to be efficient. But unless I hear specifics I'm extremely skeptical.
> She made it so that you can now build four story, four unit multiplexes
Good, but city approval for heights is probably the most boring and lowest hanging of my complaints. Zoning reform and NIMBYism is 90% of what reduces supply and kills off meaningful development.
This is a multi-decade crisis, it's not a minor policy debate in city council.
Even if they can get approval for a 4 story multiplex the fact 90% are building skyscrapers instead of other (legal) arrangements happen because it's the only one people are willing to risk $$$ on. It's extremely risky to run a development project in the city, because a) where you can build is severely capped so you have to build as high as possible and b) if you're going to navigate all of roadblocks and NIMBY backed lawyering you better be getting a property who's ROI can fund teams of lawyers and support years of development, often well before any construction start.
If we actually want to solve the housing crisis we literally need to start razing whole blocks of single family homes, industrial areas, old office buildings, etc and build high density housing.
This is radical stuff. Nothing about what Chow is proposing is anywhere close to addressing the crisis.
I'm a pretty boring social democrat in most regards, so saying this as someone who generally holds fairly leftist views on many things: the leftist ideology, very roughly speaking, believes that government intervention results in better results for the common man than a capitalist market left to its own devices; this gestures directly towards price controls, zoning laws, every kind of regulation, and socialized housing. Leftists are deeply skeptical of market-based solutions; even basic economic principles like supply-and-demand are viewed with skepticism by association with Economics as a field, which tends to be viewed (not totally or necessarily wrongly) as a false science that's more of an ideological tool of capitalists than anything. They view profit-making and companies that seek to make profit - like developers - as fundamentally impure and in need of reining in. And because of decades of urban sprawl in North America, they associate development with environmental destruction, even though, ironically, one important way we could help save the environment is by densifying the hell out of our cities. And don't get me started on fears of gentrification - although there we're beginning to blur the line between "progressives" and leftists, but those lines are already pretty blurred.
I know enough left-NIMBYs to know that their intentions are pure - it's not a case of ladder-kickers. Just a particularly bad strain of thought that's - like you said - pretty widespread in municipal politics. Probably because NIMBYism transcends ideology in a way - there's different kinds of NIMBYism across the spectrum, always with the same outcome, and many voters will happily cross party lines to keep their neighbourhood just the way it is, thank you very much.
Happily, in my experience younger urbanists - even the left-wing ones - tend to (though don't always) recognize the excesses of left-NIMBYism.
That they may have nice words and ostensibly good intentions doesn't change the fact that they're kicking the ladder and will continue to do so.
They're only "not ladder kickers" in the same way typical Republicans "aren't sexist" but continue to keep voting for the sexist party.
This is in comparison to more conventional NIMBYs, who don't really care - they feel entitled to "preserve neighbourhood character", say things like "city's full, don't move here", that sort of thing.
They probably had to pay the jacked up real estate prices...
There is an ongoing process of densification, it can be faster but it can't be done too quickly, it's not fair to blot out people's views or destroy neighbourhoods or destroy every remnant of past eras.
With these dynamics it's no surprise that city housing is so expensive, and I don't think it comes down to one factor like interest rates or greedy people, so that billboard is just political pandering. What would your attention-getting measure ask for?
I get the impression a lot of people are complaining they can't afford a family home basically in a prime-ish city location. Can't blame them for wanting that, but an option could be to move outside the cities. Properties are quite affordable, and there are some good transit corridors and decent towns (and advantages of living in the country), though better commuting options will always be welcome.
This is what I've done, an hour outside a city, I'm on a forested acre with a lake, with beautiful views year-round. I'm far from house poor so I can afford to travel all winter or do overnights in any city.
To enable this, I would push for better commuting, with more hubs and extended service so it's super easy to get to downtowns. But resolving scarcity of talent in the trades would also be key.
If this was actually a problem then it would have been solved. It's not that hard to build houses.
Personally I'd like to buy a house and convert it to an unreasonable number of apartments with a common kitchen. If you happen to hookup a kitchen in your apartment how would I know?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/198969/home-ownership-ra....
I think the right billboard should cover our shit roads and transit, and our healthcare/ER. That affects everyone (and seniors the most!)
Once there is a critical mass of single-issue pro-housing voters, we can expect to see a huge tsunami of pro-housing bills get passed for this politically lucrative issue.
As of now, old homeowners are the electoral majority. So, pro-housing politics is a losing strategy. But you can only sustain it so long in a nation with at ton of younger owned-home-started immigrants.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-home...
Did previous generations not do this as well, or is this unique to the boomers?
Before they were called boomers they were called "generation me". It should hardly be a surprise that this is what generation me would do in old age.
So could previous generations have done the same? Their generation just wasn't large enough. Then along came this crazy baby boom and suddenly there was this all-powerful voting bloc which has shaped the world.
The current 66% is (a) not that big a change and (b) still high compared to historical averages so it's not so much "plummeting" as it is "reverting to the mean".
(which means we'll just continue to uphold the status quo like we always have)
This is a direct result of insufficient supply and skyrocketing values (thanks to interest rates being too low for too long).
> About two in three Canadians lived in an owner-occupied home in 2022. Since 2017, the home ownership rate in Canada has fluctuated and in 2019, it peaked at approximately 68.6 percent. In 2022, this figure was slightly lower, at 66.5 percent.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/198969/home-ownership-ra...
If I'm living at home with mom and dad, and they own their home, I'm technically living in an owner-occupied home, aren't I?
Even those living at home with parents will be benefiting from the status quo when they eventually inherit their parent's property.
Going to Edmunston won't be very useful for them.
Can you name a few that haven’t seen house prices relative to household income skyrocket over the last 5-10 years?
https://www.point2homes.com/CA/Home-For-Sale/ON/Sault-Ste-Ma...
$260k for a multifamily home is pretty reasonable, in my books. The eternal issue though, is convincing new Canadians that there exists a life outside of the GTA and Vancouver.
Many places don't necessarily have expensive housing in absolute dollars for someone making top money, but that doesn't mean they don't have housing issues
All are safe, welcoming cities, all are relatively affordable. No they don't have an NHL team, yes they get cold in the winter. This is a cold country!
The cold is a real issue, but it's an extreme issue if you have the other two qualities, all 3 present in Winnipeg too because it's like 9 hours from any other city over 300k. I remember bussing to school every day, and walking one block would make my face feel like it was on fire, then I'd get home later and it would be dark, nobody really wants to do much except drink because there isn't much else. Sprawl and the same terrible zoning as anywhere else made it so only copy/pasted franchises would go up in the commercial areas, always along a major roadway with giant parking lots. I revisit once or twice a year, and it's deeply upsetting.
I pass through many towns like North Bay on road trips, and I have nothing against them inherently, but I think they're only suitable for the same people who just have no interest in being around many other people and bailed from Toronto as soon as their work went remote (I don't personally care for TO as much as Van). That, or people who just literally need any place to set up shop and support a family, but it's crazy to me that the major cities are essentially saying to a majority of young people who are renting their basement suites and have been for a decade, "It's cute that you want to stay where you've already built your community, but we own this and you get to pay my mortgage"
Housing is relatively affordable outside of Ontario and BC. Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns are all major metro areas where homes are less than half the price of the GTA and Vancouver metro.
The obvious fix for Ontario and BC to make housing more affordable is to allow people to build more where people want to live by relaxing zoning requirements. In 80%+ of Vancouver and 60%+ of Toronto it's literally illegal to build anything besides detached single family homes. Little of the remaining land zoned for more dense development is suitable for development. There are some smaller changes like streamlining permitting, not exempting 100% of capital gains and incentivizing speculation, and a vacancy tax to discourage speculation that would help. The problem is any changes to make housing more affordable are politically unpopular, almost 70% of Canadians are homeowners and in the short term benefit from the status quo. Also younger people are ~20% less likely to vote.
Yeah, all of these cities also have long, harsh winters.
FWIW I'm a Canadian who lived in California on work visas for several years and relocated to Australia in 2011, where I'm now a citizen. I've never regretted leaving Canada.
There are many names that Canadians from outside Toronto call Toronto...few repeatable in polite company...but I have never heard this Banana Belt term either.
> "Affectionately termed the `banana belt' of Canada, this zone boasts the warmest average annual temperatures, the longest frost-free seasons, and the mildest winters in Ontario." -- https://caroliniancanada.ca/legacy/FactSheets_CCUniqueness.h...
> "The city where I live, Toronto, is situated in what Canadians call the banana belt, because of its relatively mild climate." -- https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/gardeners-have-a-sen...
> "The 'banana belt' or Carolinian Canada is a region in Ontario found south of a line which runs approximately from Grand Bend to Toronto." -- http://erintown.blogspot.com/
> "Although this area is also known as the “banana belt” of Canada, you won't find any bananas growing here!" -- http://onnaturemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2002-spring-c...
> "This part of Ontario is often known as the "Banana Belt", because of our moderate climate, in comparison to the rest of Canada." -- https://www.pinterest.es/pin/621919029764992451/
Multiple English dictionaries describe the term as specifically Canadian, e.g. Collins:
> "a region with a warm climate, esp one in Canada" -- https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/bana...
This is not the right way to think about it. Yes these cities are cheaper than GTA/GVA, but that has always been the case. And this metric only matters if you are earning GTA/GVA incomes and looking for something cheaper than these mega cities to buy in, which arguably only affects a tiny percent of the population.
The right comparison is how these cities’ house prices compare to themselves of 3, 5, 10 years ago versus their average household income over the same time periods.
When you look at that, which is a much more relevant metric of affordability, you will find there is essentially no city in this country that hasn’t been absolutely obliterated on affordability over the last decade.
7-10 years ago it was a GTA/GVA affordability issue. Now it a story of every podunk 2 horse town from coast to coast. Why? Because of interest rates! The BoC, like most central banks, left rates too low for too long and then massively overreacted to COVID.
The ERs in GTA are just always clogged. I've had to deal with multiple instances of 10+ hour waits in the ER. When they were not addressed in time, one such incident got worse, and ended up in a 10 day serious hospital stay (love the logic on that one).
Getting an appointment with any sort of specialist is also a gauntlet.
I'm an immigrant and it was surreal hearing the new Toronto mayor talk about how much she accomplished as an immigrant to Canada. It was indeed possible when she and I came to this country. It is a fantasy today. GTA has become a terrible place to live in a very short time period.
I live in the middle of nowhere and when renewing my annual lease my rent went 10% up
It is expensive for most people who live here
And Calgary prices have shooted up due to people leaving BC and ON. Not as expensive as BC or ON but nevertheless local people are feeling the changes.
To make matters worse, enjoy not having any road infrastructure, dealing with construction and traffic, paying the highest tax in country and dealing with an incompetent government who is more concerned about replacing stop signs that say "STOP" with "ARRÊT" instead of focusing on healthcare, education and employment.
I'm not sure why everyone thinks we live in a paradise. Montreal is only "hip" if you are 18 and want to go clubbing at night. The allure of "Jazz Fest" drops off quickly.
The market has proven totally unable to solve the housing crisis and your solution is to relax regulation and incentivize builders to make more profits. The price of units and homes is already too high, incentives will just get us more market rate or above housing.
Here's another option: start to decommodify housing by building good, mixed income public housing. Vienna and Singapore have two different models that could work here.
Yes, it is. The state caused the housing issues because of their Soviet-like zoning laws.
In the US and Canada, it's very similar, though a bit different: the State has decided that only ridiculously inefficient single-family housing is allowed to be built.
Both of them are situations where the State has forced limits on what kind of housing is allowed, but the type of housing is obviously diametrically different. A better system is one where the State sets very few limits on housing, only very practical ones (no 50-story towers next to the airport, for instance), and lets landowners do what they want with their land, within reason.
My family purchased a home in the province in 2007 for less than 100k. We had to repair the foundation and roof of our house multiple times, and the previous owner used seven layers of wallpaper instead of installing insulation. Cheap homes have their own problems, and two pensions was the only reason we could afford to fix it.
Plus there's Starlink if you want to live way out in the sticks.
Given that Canada is more spacious, government expects free market will solve the housing.
I nearly choked on my milk reading this. When in the recent period has housing ever followed the rules of supply and demand? The government policy makers, nimbys and banks are constantly doing everything possible to prevent the bubble from popping and to limit supply to ensure thier nest eggs keep appreciating regardless.
If housing actually had liberated free market, without government or nimby interference, we wouldn't have a housing crisis.
Same in Europe. Nobody wants the unsustainable housing bubble to pop, because everyone , from the voters to policy makers, are heavily invested into it with the idea that it must always go up no matter what. We've basically chosen going full steam ahead towards the iceberg because "line must go up".
In better accommodations than the "berry picking talent", "retail talent", "warehouse talent" or "trucking talent" that was fashionable to bring in in previous years.
It has been a total shitshow. I started the process in June of 2022, eventually the team I was moving to got bored of waiting for the work permit in March 2023.
Factoring out the (ridiculous) 3 months it took for the relocation agency to prepare and submit my work permit application, it was six months of waiting with no feedback at all from the IRCC about where the process is stuck. All inquiries went unanswered.
Once I lost the position, I emailed the local Canadian embassy to let them know my thoughts, I was (expectedly) greeted back with an automated email saying that emails about immigration will not be looked at.
All in all, the processes in Canada are very immature and if you value predictability and stability in your life, do not attempt to get a job there.
Someone did something very wrong. The wait time for a temporary work permit from the US is a whole 5 weeks.
I've done this, the process was very transparent and predictable.
Compared to the US system it's amazing.
It has not been a good experience with me and has soured my impression of Canada tremendously.
Taking that long, brings into mind the possibility that you used an incompetent agency. Thus, maybe they also filled the actual application badly, and then the Canadian authorities had problems interpreting and processing your application.
Maybe this all can be explained by an incompetent agency, and not faults in the actual Canadian system.
However, this doesn’t excuse never answering official inquiries and being wholly uncooperative. And even a rejection would have been better than the radio silence and apathy I have experienced.
Since most governments went WFH, application processes for everything have, in my experience, gone to insane lengths. I don’t think the government union culture and WFH mixed well.
I am Canadian and the government actually said a couple of times that WFH employees were more efficient.
I think they (whoever applied on your behalf) did something wrong with your application
I did mine myself and my company had someone at IRCC to confirm everything was correct, then I submitted, it took if much 2 months for my approval
I have 8YoE in Cloud and quite in demand in Germany(recently got a good offer, which i'm considering, from a German company purely because of my open source contributions, also passed HC in one of FAANGs, but stuck in team match phase due to layoffs). I sent 10s of applications(it's hard to send 100s as i'm highly specialized) and didn't get a single interview from that.
This (https://www.google.com/maps/@49.2632824,-123.0709435,3a,82.3...) is across the street from Commercial-Broadway station, the busiest skytrain station in Metro Vancouver at the intersection of the two major lines. The lines were constructed in 1986 and 2002 so they've had a good 37 years to densify the area. It's the same story in every city outside of Montreal and Quebec City.
Then there's the many ways that Canadian homeowners benefit at the expense of everyone else from subsidies. Unlike in the US, capital gains on primary residences in Canada are completely tax free with no limit. That incentivizes people to invest as much as possible into buying as much home as they can. Then, in some jurisdictions like Ontario and BC, owner-occupied homes are actually charged less property taxes. In other words, renters are subsidizing homeowners. Then, in some provinces like in BC, you can actually apply to defer paying property taxes entirely until you're dead at which point the estate pays the balance. Further, homeowners with a home worth less than about 2.125 million, and you are 65 or older, you are eligible for a grant of $1045 per month discount on your property taxes simply for being a poor downtrodden homeowner. Being a homeowner also gives you the right to vote in every municipality that you own property in. So we have a municipal politics in which property owners are given more of a voice than residents themselves. Absolutely fucking disgusting
I’ve owned in both and I am not sure what you are referring to. Residential mill rates don’t seem to distinguish between owner occupied and not. The only thing I can think of that resembles what you are talking about is the extra tax on vacant homes or extra tax in some municipalities on secondary homes?
> Then, in some provinces like in BC, you can actually apply to defer paying property taxes entirely until you're dead at which point the estate pays the balance.
There’s interest that applies too right? It is essentially a loan from the municipality and I think it also gets paid if you sell before death. I agree that it is totally bizarre that BC offers this.
> Further, homeowners with a home worth less than about 2.125 million, and you are 65 or older, you are eligible for a grant of $1045 per month discount on your property taxes simply for being a poor downtrodden homeowner.
Yup, this is ludicrous and a self-serving item by and for boomers. I think this is per year though - not per month.
That’s not true
- Everyone wants to live in the same places. From what I understand, Toronto is the elephant in the room in Canada. It's the #1 and almost everyone wants to live there. Also, most of Canada's farmland is below the 49th parallel. Next up are Vancouver and Montreal. Vancouver is hemmed in by mountains and floodplains so you can't just build everywhere. There may be a local version of this as well.
- Plain old demand outstrips supply. Y'all are building housing like crazy in Vancouver, compared to the Bay Area, but folks who've lived there a while tell me that the place was discovered after the Olympics. Someone else mentioned zoning, which may work with this point and the previous point, but we don't know.
- The business / investor class is relatively static. In the naughts, there was this idea that software developers should not be paid more than X, and that the only way to move up was to become a manager. Despite that, salaries crept up because of competition from finance, until the collusion between Jobs and others was exposed. Is there some wider version of this in society? I don't know. In Oregon, non-competes only apply to people up to a certain level of income, so this sort of thing may be subtle.
- Property taxes are low but income taxes are high. This would favor investing in real estate rather than the labor market.
- Immigration for skilled labor is difficult. This would depress average incomes, especially if the immigrants you are losing are the sort who tend to use more services.
- Infrastructure / building costs are expensive, e.g. if the cost of infrastructure is subsidized through housing any way. Canada's topography is not as blessed as the U.S. It is not lacking for resources, but the only region of Canada where it's easy to transport said resources, without significant capital investment, is in the Toronto area. In the U.S., if you want to ship grain, you just float it down the river. That's super cheap. And then how do you get it to population centers? Most of Canada is big and spread out, and the rivers run north in many parts too. I imagine that in a lot of it, you have to build roads, and it's hard to build roads to all of the places. This restricts the actual amount of land that's available for settlement.
So yeah, someone with a LOT of time and experience doing econometrics could go and quantify these and other things, if the data is there. They may need to gather data themselves.
Plan is to increase our population by about 500k per year(I think about 200K natural growth & 300K immigration).
We already have a housing shortage. They created a 10bil housing fund. Plan is for this fund to... invest in the stock market, and use the interest to fund the construction of 6000 houses a year.
It's a fucking joke.
People talk about Big Australia(govt policy of sharply increasing population) for geopolitical reasons, but I think it's simpler than that. My personal theory is that the govt doesn't want to go into a technical recession and be excoriated in the murdoch press as bad economic managers because they were left holding the previous govts turd sandwich.
The parallels between Australia & Canada are interesting, but i'm curious why the Canadian govt is motivated to do this...
....... ?
Canada's number of permanent and non permanent residents increased by 1 million or so in 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-22/canada-s-...
Permanent visa quotas are indexed as a percentage of population since 15-20 years ago, and it was reduced this year for the first time in ages be 5k less (195->190).
Net overseas migration is commonly touted but that includes citizens/students etc and is just that years entrants - departures: highly affected by recent global disruptions during covid.
Key statistics
Statistics in this release are commonly known as Estimated Resident Population (ERP).
Australia’s population was 26,268,359 people at 31 December 2022.
The quarterly growth was 127,078 people (0.5%).
The annual growth was 496,800 people (1.9%).
Annual natural increase was 109,800 and net overseas migration was 387,000.When the immigrants have equal rights and they get the job, that's a fair meritocracy. Immigrants don't automatically like getting paid less or work in a toxic environment or live in a shitty house, they endure it due to the restrictions on their rights to move and work. In other word, Immigrants are not people who don't know better.
When you limit the immigration, that's like the taxi medallion system which creates a fake shortage which benefits only the medallion holders. You end up with shitty taxis.
There's nothing wrong to be paid fair market wage. I wish we can just abolish this medallion system altogether, people shouldn't be asking for permission to work and travel. This must be an universal human right.
It's all stat juking. They can write bigger budgets because they are allowed to assume $x per immigrant in the economic plans, so increasing immigration means more budget funds.
The problem is that that assumption is highly dependent on who is immigrating. A highly educated healthy person will make a net contribution, others will cost the government and the governments will turn to subsidizing their employment in the private sector to reduce the cost. This becomes wage lowering pressure. Businesses that rely on mass labor get a government subsidized labor force that keeps their local labor in check.
So, yeah, probably still relatively low takeup, but it's going to solve a corner case that, if I had the energy or interest to move back to Canada (which unfortunately seems to have suffered lots of the same issues the US has in the past several years, just in differing flavors at times), I'd be thankful to have solved.
So many of these "talent" visa's don't look at talent at all.
Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries permits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505152 - June 2023 (583 comments)
Canada's new tech talent strategy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36506854 - June 2023 (78 comments)
I tried to immigrate to Canada, from Europe, some 8 years ago. Degree in CS, many years of experience under my belt. Even had a remote senior developer job and was looking into using a dual taxation law that my country has with them, so that I could pay my taxes in Canada.
Took the language tests and got a ~95%. Then just hit a wall. Needed points (in their point based application process) to progress my application. And I would have gotten plenty of those if I had quit my high paying tech job to become a store clerk.
At that point I decided this was just silly, packed my suitcases and went back home.
Only 10,000 people? Sounds like a good, but quickly fading opportunity.
- https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/subjects-start/population_and_d...
This is true on a state by state basis in the US as well. Hawaii is a nightmare to hire workers in, so much so that our HR put their foot down and told me they're not supporting it anymore. Meanwhile hiring someone in Washington, Texas, or Florida is a breeze.
I pulled out of Mexico in my current role and moved those jobs to Chile, Brazil, and the Balkans. The reason had nothing to do with the talent of the engineers in Mexico and everything to do with how painful it is to deal with their government.
If Canada wants high paying tech jobs there is a very straight-forward way for them to get them: make their government bureaucracy more efficient and pass those savings on to your citizens.
Federally both rates are ~20% between 50-80k, NYC comes in at 15% state tax, a lot of the Canadian tax rates are up to 15% tax rate, as low as 10%.
It seems quite believable that the tax rates can be similar.
"Social Security will be the biggest expense, budgeted at $1.196 trillion. It's followed by Medicare at $766 billion and Medicaid at $571 billion." https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...
The US does sink a considerable amount into what I would call "discretionary social services".
In comparison Canada seems to only spend ~300 billion on healthcare, and ~300 billion on social security. Their economy is a 6x smaller in terms of population, 3x in terms of GDP, so proportionally, saying 4x (4x600 =2.4 trillion) they spend about the same as the US does (~2.5 trillion).
The purported difference in quality is probably mostly to do with drug cost, whereas US drug companies can and do charge premiums Canadian ones can often create or source relatively safe knock-offs, while they may not have the same (number of) sophisticated facilities that the US might have.
I’d love nice things for taxes in the USA but the pay tends to be higher enough here to offset it for engineers.
I.e. higher taxes = no need for medical insurance; lower taxes = you should include private insurance in your overall calculations.
I'd say the spending per person might be higher in the US due to private medical insurance, i.e. you have a middleman who works for profit. In more social states there's no middleman and healthcare is cheaper, regardless of how it's paid for.
That said, if you get into a car accident and are taken to the ER with serious injuries, you will not wait. You will be patched up with some of the best quality care in the world and leave without paying a dime.
Our system isn't perfect but I'd take it over any system where someone can be financially ruined due to an accident, or worse yet have to take shortcuts that jeapardize their health to try and avoid this.
I pay less tax in Switzerland, including health insurance (which is paid privately, not via taxes or by employer), than I did in the UK, and get much better service.
(Conversely I pay more for a bank account and get worse service. But it's negligible compared to taxes of course.)
That engineer, if located in Vancouver, will pay $69K in income taxes. The same person working in San Francisco would pay $67K. But the San Francisco employer doesn’t get a tax credit of $120K and they also have to pay perhaps $12,000 or more per year in healthcare premiums.
Canada has its flaws. Ultimately the country is subsidized by resource revenues, leading to distortions. But the USA has the military industrial complex. Pick your poison. I think Canada is a healthier democracy and a better place to raise your kids.
For an office of a few hundred people, large enough to not qualify for most of the cost and paperwork reducing programs, it is likely not nearly as clear-cut.
California adds 8.84%. Texas and Washington tax gross receipts rather than net income, so it’s hard to make a direct comparison. But overall, corporate taxes in Canada are considered low by international standards.
As for business regulation, the reality for a tech business is that you rarely cross any regulatory boundaries. Employment law is straightforward. You can fire people easily. There aren’t tons of hidden costs. A little bit is spent on healthcare (1.5% in BC, zero in most other provinces). When I hear from American colleagues they complain of red tape more than my friends in Canada do.
Do yourself a favour and don't fall for it.
It's night and day compared to America. All the companies are in America, while we find only a handful of start ups or some branch's of corporations in Canada.
Give a read to the /r/cscareerquestionscad subreddit
There's countless stories of "I have CS degree, intern experience, and portfolio of projects but after 500+ applications I can't land a job".
Articles like this make me want to quit everything. I try so hard to get into these field then the government claims no one can fill these roles and we need to import more people instead.
The choice is between jobs going offshore or people coming to work here as most new grads are not job ready. I have interviewed ones who have never done a pull request before.
I am an Indian graduate who has decent experience with actual programming, even contributed to open source, and yet struggled to get a job in between my peers who have done 300 Leetcode problems and nothing else.
So I assume the hiring meter for most juniors is not "can use version control" or "can architect a 1000 line codebase with decent OOP". It's "can recurgigate 300-500 common Leetcode problems and can cheat in online coding tests". We are all in a bubble.
Some companies do focus on Leetcode, that is true. Mine do not, but on the other hand we expect you to fit neatly into the role of developer without needing to be told about Docker, GitHub, testing. Tons of grads have no idea of the difference between a unit test and an integration test.
Of course there's a bunch of people that can't find jobs, a CS degree is not a rigorous endeavour, there's no bar exam, no MCAT. Just a bunch of people who think it's a free lunch surprised they have to compete for it.
Presumably you exclude Waterloo, Toronto, UBC, and McGill from the list of awful programs. What do you have in mind? Brock? Guelph? UVic? UPEI? MUN? Lethbridge? USask?
A lot of those are likely mediocre, but probably ok(I have never encountered a grad from those programs admittedly), but many aren't even coming from undergrad CS programs but from the diploma mill colleges like Seneca and Sheridan that hire fake professors or from one year masters in CS programs. Don't get me started on the career colleges, one of which offered me an instructional job in my third year of university.
and
most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those...
are incompatible with one another. Which is it, HN? Do you want the Indian guy who can't speak English, doesn't understand you, but can whip up a microservice architecture in a week or the Canuck with whom you can communicate, will learn from you, but does not know anything outside of Java?
There is a minimum level of useful skill that is required to avoid having to spend a bunch of time training them.
Neither the Indian CS person or the new grad are great options. Ideally you want senior devs. But given the choice, I would prefer the Indian CS person as then the communications become more Product's problem than technical mentoring which is mine.
This is not directly competing with Canadian citizens looking to work for Canadian companies.
The directly part is because while in Canada, it is possible that a digital nomad may apply for and get a job for a Canadian company in which case the visa can get changed and they can stay longer.
But the digital nomad 6 month part isn't competing... directly.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne... (different page than the article)
Promoting Canada as a destination for digital nomads
A digital nomad is a person who can perform their job remotely from anywhere in the world.
Under current Canadian immigration rules, a digital nomad only needs visitor status to relocate to Canada for up to six months at a time while they perform their job remotely for a foreign employer.
In the months ahead, IRCC will collaborate with public and private partners alike to determine whether additional policies to attract digital nomads to Canada would be desirable.
We expect that some digital nomads who initially enter Canada to work remotely will decide to seek opportunities with Canadian employers. When they receive a job offer from a Canadian company, they would be able to bring their skills to a Canadian employer by applying for a temporary work permit or even permanent residence.That's bullshit, or you're looking at the tail end. Or these people are applying for jobs that require experience without any. What's their interview success rate? What's their target salary? They can't land any job? Ridiculous.
If there really was an overload of talent in Canada, it would be pumping out unicorns - it's not.
If there's 1M canadians in tech I would expect tens of thousands of those stories to be true.
The more talent there is in Canada, the more talented work can be done. The two most famous tech companies were founded by people without college degrees, just access to the American talent market. You can look good on paper, complain to the world about it, or actually get shit done.
Someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread that Canada has high taxes and a difficult bureaucracy. If Canada's government is business-unfriendly and their closest neighbor and competitor is the USA, then Canada might face a lack of people with talent for business. As in, the sort of person who would pump out unicorns would rather move to the US.
Then they would have lots of talented CS people, but nobody to hire them.
I’ve run tech companies in Canada for over 20 years. It’s a perfectly fine place to do business.
I think historically the thing preventing startups here from taking off was lack of access to capital
The issue is that you'll get offers of 75k from angels and 500k from VCs. You go to SF, and before your pitch is done, you have a seed of 1M signed and ready to go.
Eh, no. If you ship a bunch of CS majors off to a cattle farm, they aren't going to get hired to do websites for the cows.
You need demand for the talent or the talent is not economically useful.
The is more obvious when you think about other areas that require talent but underpay (or have a talent glut), e.g. music, art, dance. Becoming a musician on average will not result in fantastic pay, yet composing music and playing an instrument both require talent.
> or actually get shit done.
You assume there is shit to get done - new companies take venture capital (either from a VC or a Bank) and a business plan to be profitable. Lacking those, if the companies that are successful are not going gang-busters wild profitable, they likely don't have the capital to expand their operations, and new people seeking to break into the market won't be able to fund themselves to do so.
There's 0 funding. No VCs will back you unless you move to the states. Local angels want 25% of your company for 75k.
Canada has a ton of small devs making a good amount, but no big companies come out of here because there's no money to accelerate growth.
So tried to find some basic job and it is even worse there. DoorDash is not hiring anymore, all my applications to custodian and similar jobs got rejected. I went to a bunch of restaurants around the town and applied to dishwasher, cook and similar positions, filled their forms and never heard back. I don't know what to do.
That will always attract both talent and con-artists to US, Canada etc.
Because for the same amount of effort (or same amount of risk for the con-artists) -- the rewards are much higher.
This will only change if US currency will stop being the reserve currency of the world.
When (or if) US will stop being reserve currency of the world, it will cause a cascading effect that will likely cause a temporary collapse of the socio-economic, judicial, and political pillars of Western economies and Canada, Australia.
Then all these talent acquisition strategies will stop working.
All the policies will turn towards reducing chances of civil wars that will be breaking inside these countries.
Until then, it is hard to blame immigrants for seeking higher standard of living for the same amount of effort.
And governments will not really care what will benefit the locals. Because the political systems in Canada, US, UK are not really representative of the people, they are representative of the lobbyist and powerful interests.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Unfortunately, those service-job immigrants are now priced out of housing due to all the previous immigration.
So in order that residential properties continue to inflate, we now need to bring in "tech talent": immigrants who have some ghost of a chance of actually affording to live here.
In some ten years, Immigration Canada will be all about attracting "CEO talent", "chief of hospital talent" and such.
Greater Toronto Area for those unaware.
On the other hand, Western countries are very indebted and the only way out is growth. Immigrants tend to have more kids, and work harder, longer hours for less money.
There's a reason white millennials in north america aren't having kids and growing the economy: it just simply doesn't make sense. It's not obtainable.
Relative to the USA’s really broken healthcare system, it’s still an improvement.
As long as your insurance approves.
Providers cannot deny you care for your lack of insurance.
>utter bankruptcy.
Not paying your medical debt doesn't necessarily 'send' you to bankruptcy(stays on credit report for 7 years generally, unless enforced by a court order - which it usually doesn't), you have to actually file for it. But we're arguing with semantics so I'll just agree with you.
However, that is not what you said.
Your comment implied that someone has to be approved by insurance to receive treatment, which is not true.
This is a complete fabrication. You can get an x-ray for anything same day in any Canadian city. There is zero backlog for x-rays.
1: https://www.cihi.ca/en/wait-times-for-priority-procedures-in...
Maybe they are talking about hip replacements taking 6 months?
It's common for doctors to have a "single issue per visit" policy these days, which is completely ridiculous because obviously a patient's entire overall condition should be taken into consideration when deciding on a strategy to address issues. And patients are not themselves medical professionals, they are not really in a position to say that two different symptoms are actually unconnected. But doctors are paid by the government on a per-appointment basis so they want to churn through as many as possible. They want you out the door ASAP.
We basically are dealing with third world level of care in this country, and Canadians accept it because "at least we're not America". Even middle class Canadians are being forced to travel to the US to receive basic services in a timely manner.
I particularly agree with doctors doing little proactive work, but this is very doctor dependant. I've had doctors who are like this, and others who been quite proactive. I don't see what that situation would be any different in the US.
Stop parroting this nonsense.
You get access to it when you need it IF you have paid for insurance. Otherwise, maybe you're on a bronze plan and whatever specialist you need to see costs $10K out of pocket, on top of the $30K in coverage you already have to pay just for base insurance.
When I was shopping, I didn't see any difference in coverage by changing the metal. I went with the Bronze, because it had the least total for monthly costs + out of pocket max, which in theory means if I don't use much, I pay less, and if I cap out, I pay less. The other metals make more sense, IMHO, if you have a lot of contact with the medical system, but not enough to hit the out of pocket max. Of course, employer based plans can be a lot better than marketplace plans, most/many marketplace plans don't over coverage out of your home area/state, where a lot of employer based plans have nationwide coverage. It's a mess.
- From the experience of people I know who have needed urgent care (heart attack, cancer, anorexia, broken bones, etc), my Ontario provincial health system works pretty well, and was often excellent. The people I know received timely, high quality treatment (despite all the bad press in the news these days), at zero out of pocket cost.
- The areas that Canadian healthcare is most falling behind on are (a) access to primary care, and (b) treatment of serious things that probably won't kill you (e.g. joint replacements, cataract surgery). For (a) few people are going to travel to the US to see a family doctor. For (b) this is mostly seniors, who usually decide to grind through another 6 months on the hip replacement wait list rather than pay US$50k today.
- US healthcare is very expensive if you're paying list price. Waiting longer and getting free care in Canada often looks pretty good by comparison. Any reimbursement from your provincial health insurance will be a small fraction of the total US bill. Maybe you could save a month on getting treatment for your cancer or whatever, but is that month worth US$100k or whatever out of your family's life savings? Most people decide "no".
- Where will you live in the US while receiving treatment (e.g. for cancer)? Will your job allow you to be away? The cost of travel and lodgings adds to the cost of the already expensive healthcare. And if you feel crummy (e.g. because you have cancer and you're on chemo) you don't want to have to go through airports and live in hotel rooms, you want to be in your home.
- If despite all the above you decide to be a medical tourist, why would you choose the US? Once you're hopping on a plane and paying cash, there are often better countries in the world. I have heard of people going to Mexico, Lebanon, and India for treatment, and much lower cost than the US, while still getting high levels of care.
My favorite example of this is Prime Minister Chretien's secret trips to the Mayo Clinic in 1999. <https://web.archive.org/web/20100204202553/http://www.montre...>
I didn't mean to minimize the issues with Canada's medical system, and I can understand why there's so much frustration from people who have to deal with it.
No one over 50 and worrying about death would rather be in Canada though.
I had family members who had heart attacks at roughly the same time, one in the US and one in Canada. It is unbelievable how slow everything goes in Canada when they were both needing basically the same treatments.
I love it here too, but as someone young(ish) with a stable job and who got into a home outside the downtown core before the latest boom.. it's a lot easier to look past Victoria's faults.
No city is perfect I suppose.
The usual Canadian caveat definitely applies: tech salaries are way lower than in the US. And the discrepancy between those salaries and cost of living here is pretty extreme even by Canadian standards.
We're also suffering from the typical West Coast city problems of homelessness/drug abuse/mental illness/property crime.
But, on the flip side: you get the best weather in the country, your backyard is some of the most beautiful nature on the planet, we have a vibrant and unique and walkable downtown, we have tons of great biking infrastructure, and there's reasonably convenient access to both Vancouver and Seattle when you need them. I love it here; it's a city with a lot of problems but a lot of potential.
Same goes for Sweden btw.
It's complex, but overall the US system is better than Canada's. It's not as clear cut comparing the US to some European countries, but with Canada it's mostly clear cut. And it's especially clear cut for tech workers. If you work in tech, you're highly likely to have very good coverage through your employer, you will almost surely experience much better availability and speed of care, probably better quality, and the extra out-of-pocket costs are absolutely dwarfed by the superior pay in the US.
The pay is more like 40%-20% lower. Senior devs can just negotiate remote roles with US companies.
Rent in Toronto is definitely not the same as SF, even if you ignore the currency gap. Cost of living overall is way cheaper.
Toronto rent is definitely cheaper though. But probably not enough for the pay discrepancy and higher taxes
Specifically, despite having higher population per square mile than the US (1 person per 10 miles compared to 1 person per 80 miles), they have about the 6th of the population, and fewer major city centers (about 10 > 500k in Canada versus about 30 > 500k in the US).
Fewer large city centers translates to fewer tech companies, more competition for housing hence home and rent increases, less reliable health care, and of the fewer tech companies that do exist they have a smaller market, hence lower pay.
Climate/terrain is also a huge issue, large portions of their provinces are either frozen tundra or "back-woods-y", which is great if you want to live on a farm or go long-distance skiing or sledding, but pretty poor for building population centers. I wouldn't want to be living there right now with the recent outbreaks of fires and smoke/smog, either (not all their fault, but).
This is not a set of problem unique to Canada, either - depending on where you live in the US the health care system can be equally or worse broken, thanks to localized over-population or under-population - e.g. Maine/Alaska have a lot of problems with being both poor and barren states with mostly tourism for industry, and simultaneously absurdly expensive to live in due to their tourism, states like NYC and SoCal suffer extreme over-population that necessitates small fortunes to even maintain a meager lifestyle and drive out lower-class workers, and on the flip side overly conservative states like Texas suffer from rampant corruption and as a result healthcare and utilities are generally some mix of unsafe, unaffordable, in-accessible, outside of the large city centers (and now in some cases illegal thanks to recent political events in the US).
I think you have this way backwards. Canada has a larger land mass than the US, but about 10% of the population.
3,855,103 sq m 36,991,981 people in Canada is 36,991,981 / 3,855,103 ~= 10 people per square mile. 3,794,100.43 sq m ~300 000 000 people in US is 300 000 000 / 3,794,100.43 ~= 80 people per square mile.
So yes, US is more populated (which is what I incidentally thought initially, I figured it was map skew not a units flip so I didn't question it), but my point remains - Canada has fewer population centers than the US.
Except that one giant benefit that this has over H1-Bs in the US is that it is not tied to a single employer and the worker isn't kicked out with little time to find a new job if they leave an old job, which are the primary factors allowing employers to exploit and underpay their H1-B employees.
It's not as simple as companies lowering costs, migration also creates conditions that concentrate wealth and creates unpleasant rapid growth.
From what I have personally seen, there is a general feeling that the social costs of migration are not worth it.
Sure, you can afford highly complex consumer goods, but you have are now just another cog in the globaly homogeneous exploitation machine.
That's nice, but the reason there are so many "socialist" tendencies is there are so many authoritarian, nigh even fascist tendencies emerging. Companies are and have been increasing the cost of those goods and services, regardless of what inflation has been doing, _and not decreasing the prices afterwards_.
Lower cost of goods and services is a "conservative" fever dream - utter buck nonsense.
"Countries that meddle with the economy to keep incomes high end up having lower quality of life."
A corrupt person in a boardroom is the same as a corrupt person in political power - nobody benefits. Socialism at least demands those in positions of otherwise un-earned power are held accountable.
No company cares about people and no country really cares about foreign nationals (especially non-refugees). It's all demand and supply. When workforce demand is high and supply is low, wages go high. They don't go high because you have a degree but because there are less people with a degree. Countries want these people because employers want them. If there are more people, wages could be lower but it will also attract more employers and hence more jobs for everyone possibly. There is no real answer whether this is helpful for an economy or not. It's a chicken and egg problem. Without talent there will be less companies interested in a geo area and without enough jobs there will be less talent attracted. So, countries are trying to solve one part of the problem (talent) with regulation.
Good job I guess.
Writing avionics software, for instance, I would definitely consider "engineering". And that's a bit of an extreme case; there's lots of other software out there with a lot of rigor.
But yes, a LOT of software these days is just slapped together with processes that don't resemble any kind of true engineering practice at all.
However, let's not forget that even industries with "real engineering" are frequently full of bad or nonexistent engineering practices: just look OceanGate, or the Boeing 737MAX.
I'd say it's still a very small section though, and the vast majority of "software engineers" are really just programmers. Myself included.