Canada had poached 10k tech workers from the U.S. – in just 48 hours
thestar.com
thestar.com
It's nice to have the tech workers. But will the tech employers want to invest in a regulatory basket-case country?
In reality they likely will commit a small fraction to it and only a small fraction of interested tech companies may loosely coordinate against it. Even in that case I think they have better then 50-50 odds of seeing it through.
So the actual situation could be the opposite.
This seems like a weird point to bring up in this context. The only thing that matters for a tech company to "defeat" Canada over this regulatory bill is whether the population cares enough to make this topic a voting issue. Canada's GDP and mineral resources don't really help it win this kind of "war". I don't really think we expected Zuckerberg to lead the Meta-Battalion across the 49th parallel just to get CBC articles on Facebook sans-tariff.
Canada does not operate on the US system in terms of politics, it's much more like the UK in that regard.
Take just about any industry in Canada and there's between one and five major enterprises that the government is VERY in bed with and fights tooth and nail to keep out competition.
I got stuck in traffic behind an anti-vax convoy that had "don't tread on me" flags. saw at least one confederate flag. on big Ford or Dodge trucks, too.
Alberta even had a real push for a second to ban gay marriage. wouldn't have survived a federal charter challenge, but it's there. Ontario has a mini-Trump (Ford #2) who is actively trying to privatize everything.
there may be a parliamentary style gov, but the tone, tenor, and driving factors like the urban-rural divide are much closer to the US.
The USA would like access to those resources, and during trade negotiations, some industries need to be sacrificed (impose tariffs) in order to get access to them.
I think you're underestimating tech companies and overestimating Canada and severely underestimating the influence of money in politics.
US Senators have been found to be bought for as low ten-thousand dollars.
The winners have always been picked by a different process than the actual voting. It's like forcing a card in close up magic.
It's the false pretense of fairness and our votes mattering that we need as glue to maintain order.
No they're not, they're trying to keep the property bubble alive, artificially inflate gdp growth and drive down wages for the oligarchs who want to keep their fiefs. It has nothing to do with tech leadership.
It remains to be seen how many actually move. And after moving how many actually stay for long or try to come back to the US on a TN or L1 visa.
I would bet most won't end up staying in Canada long term.
Canada allows a lot less family-based immigration than the US. Parent-sponsoring permanent residences are limited to 10,000/year compared to no cap in the US.
Overall it's the opposite. The US places a heavy emphasis on family-based immigration vs Canada that puts most of their emphasis on point-based skilled immigration.
you can still do so, but the application process has changed to a lottery system, where you get pulled and are then your family is invited to apply. wait time may take years and its not a guarantee.
source: am in Canada, know people who have done it, have done so myself
There's a ton of months-old accounts here with very low karma loading the comments section up with feckless cowardice in the form of anti-government, anti-immigration, unthinking garbage. Seriously, click on a bunch and see.
There's a LOT of valid criticism about Canada's economic situation. But carefully observe how every one of those comments plays on your fears and anxieties. They speak with hyperbole and aggression. They're trying to manipulate you through your instincts.
I'm hopeful I'll get picked in one of the new tech rounds, but we'll see.
I can't speak to the honesty, atroturfing, propaganda, whatever you wanna call it, but online I've noticed a general negative tone and attitude towards the Canadian economy and government. Very little of the opinion pieces I see say anything good. By opinion pieces I refer to HN/Reddit, not news corporations. It's very one sided online.
But that's really just a symptom of the fact that there are very real economic problems here. Climate change is becoming a disaster. Economic ripples from COVID continue. The housing market is completely broken. Inflation up.
When times are tough, people get scared. When people get scared, they respond more to emotion and impulse than logic and reason. That creates a market for charlatans who will give them simple explanations and simple solutions.
>And we've got a Conservative Party leader
So you have adopted your "everything is fine [just ignore that the house is on fire]" position purely for partisan reasons? You convince yourself that everyone with a different position than you is actually some astroturfing Conservative operative? I hope you realize how intellectually dishonest that is.
I detest PP and his veneer of populism and conspiracy theory adjacency. But no amount of fairytales or painting over can change the absolutely dire situation in Canada right now, and I would be absolutely ashamed to try to paint this as okay because I want the current guy to win.
Canada added a million+ new residents in the past year, and continues at that staggering clip. This is a rate that makes developing countries blush[1]. In absolute numbers it beat every other developed country in population growth. Not per capita, absolute numbers. All despite the fact that there is an enormous housing crisis and housing starts have actually dropped (though if they didn't they couldn't accommodate 1/4 that rate). Millions of Canadians are in the perilous situation of being unable to afford housing if their current situation demanded it, anxiously worry about the next mortgage renewal or that their landlord decides to pull a renoviction. People are staying with abusive partners, and children are going to be living with their parents indefinitely. Fertility rates were bad and now they're going to devastated.
Economic homelessness -- not mental illness or substance abuse -- is exploding.
There was a time when you might get priced out of the big city, but now there literally is nothing left. For those falling through the cracks there are no cheap areas left anywhere in the country.
But don't worry -- we can solve the housing crisis by, they claim, more immigration. And when that fails I'll let you fill in the blanks with the solution, so long as you guess "more immigration". This government has been selling rolls of quarters for a nickel and then demanding more rolls to make up for the losses.
Every ill just demands more immigration to this government. And to the governments before, and likely the government after, because ever questioning immigration was verboten, forbidden under the guise that despite Canada being a hugely diverse country built by immigrants, if you questioned immigration levels you clearly must be a racist.
Wage suppression is Canada's "competitiveness" (our productivity gap just keeps increasing. In Canada you don't automate or seek efficiencies, you just demand the government give you an army of TFWs. We have a GDP per capita below Alabama and dropping).
Canada's best tech workers leave to the US, so just import foreign workers who couldn't get into the US, or who are poised to get sent out from the US. What a loser strategy. We do the same with scientists and doctors. The best go to the US, so just accept the sloppy seconds from elsewhere.
Canada has more international "students" than the United States, despite having 1/12th the student spaces. And I quote students because many are students of strip mall diploma mills, taking advantage of the fact that this government gave them a full work permit and is a track towards permanent residency, whereupon they can sponsor their family from home as well who funded this adventure. Get a full time job, live 8 to a basement for a slumlord and hit up the food bank for food. This is happening en masse right now. It is scandalous exploitation.
Canada has a massive temporary foreign worker program using wage suppressing foreign labour at staggering rates in critical positions like...factory worker and fast food worker. Under this purportedly "progressive" government the program, like the rate of immigration and the number of "students", has exploded.
It is because I am a progressive that I find all of this disgusting. We are at the end stages of some of the most hostile anti-worker policies conceivable. So while this announcement is just a raindrop in a downpour, that doesn't excuse it when the country is flooding.
[1] - Like all developed countries Canada has a birth rate deficiency, and is a nation of immigrants that relies upon immigration for continued health. The actual deficiency is 1/4 the current pace of intake, however.
Immigration needs to slow down _massively_ - it doesn't need to stop and I don't want it to stop either.
I'd be 1000% more likely to support increased immigration if we had the services and resources in place to support new Canadians. Zero questions asked.
But right now? Healthcare is busted - immigration policies are busted - housing markets are busted...
Canada does not care about its workers. Their immigration policy shows it for all to see.
Polling data shows that the recent slide in approval is coming mostly from Liberal and NDP voters.
https://angusreid.org/trudeau-poilievre-singh-approval-favou...
You appear to work remote for a US firm, which makes this a bit humorous. Actual recent graduates trying to find work in tech in Canada -- even accepting the enormous domestic discount -- are meeting a wall. Actual low income residents who have literally zero housing options and are ending up legitimately homeless...hey, you got yours, so too bad.
>There's a ton of months-old accounts ... They're trying to manipulate you through your instincts.
Such brazen attempts to disqualify any opposing viewpoints is so shameless.
Canada is at a legitimate crisis level right now, and it is just more fuel on the fire. If you think this is simply a play on fears and anxieties, you have a harsh disconnect from reality.
I agree with the parent in that shillbots are out of control, and are visible across several domains, and not just about Canada -- anything vaguely or political seems to be getting it extra hard as of late. there has been a notable uptick on reddit, twitter, lemmy, HN, etc.
certainly someone with "ML learning fanantic" in their profile can grasp how incredibly easy it is to use GPT-3 to abuse HN and similar platforms.
Canada had the highest immigration in the developed world in absolute numbers, which is positively insane. Canada has the most overleveraged housing in the world. Canada has the lowest availability rate of housing. Canada's productivity has been constantly falling off of its peers. Canada's wage gap with the US for skilled workers is large and growing. Canada has more international students than the US, a country with 12x more student spaces. Canada has a massive foreign worker program. All of these have exploded over the past few years, and are very much new and hitting the breaking point.
These are all entirely unique. But the [hand wave] "yeah everywhere is bad yo" bit is a common retort.
Groceries have gone up in price. Shelter has gone up in price for both renting and buying. Healthcare is in shambles. Wages haven't been keeping up with inflation the last decade+, let alone the past two years.
Yes, I understand the entire world is reeling from a pandemic and horrific monetary policies put in place by said governments and corporations that manipulate it for their own gain.
The government has chosen to enact policies against the best interest of most of its citizens - at least those making less than $100k/year - and they continue to do so at the expense of everybody.
What will be the "straw that breaks the camel's back" for the majority of Canadians to finally realize that their government doesn't care about them and only cares about bringing in more foreign money to prop up the absolute sham of a "housing market" they have while suppressing wages for lower level entry positions like service industries or entry-level IT jobs?
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-real...
>Canada’s population growth will likely slow from its current frantic pace as immigration officials work through the pandemic backlog of applications, but not by all that much. Barring a vast improvement in productivity, Canada’s per-capita GDP – and our standard of living – appear headed for an outright decline.
I was making great money compared to my local peers. But compared to my American colleagues I was making half.
If my CoL is higher living in the Bay Area I would then expect to be compensated for that , and that seems fair .
Even when paid higher the quality of life and net savings people living in high CoL areas have are considerably less than in low CoL so am not sure it is better to have the higher compensation
Generally not possible for the average Canadian unless they've got 80% percentile tech skills, and/or did some time working in the US.
Not sure why it isn't more common, even if salaries stay roughly equal (after conversion to CAD), there is tremendous savings to be had just in health insurance costs alone.
TBH I don’t know why some places even bother hiring American devs. Canucks are half-priced and I can’t tell the difference working with a mix of US and Canadian employees.
I worked for a company with a Canadian arm and we had very few Canucks in development roles, and the few we had were Quebecois, and they were acqui-hired. Anyone getting hired by an American company is looking to immigrate.
That simply isn’t true.
Absolutely not true. I just left an American company composed of 1/3rd Canadians and none have demonstrated an interest in relocating. I could go into the many reasons why that might be, but things would get pretty political pretty quickly...
America isn't the murderous hellscape that many Canadians think it is.
What a joke....
Taxed once. I work for a SF company that has set up a Canadian arm of the business.
Despite all that, it’s a bargain compared to Bay Area pay.
On a tangent what are you're taxes like, 52%?
Net out, about 38% overall.
Even vancouver isn't the bad.
But its a remote world, just live somewhere normal priced.
> taxed at 45% and even double taxed
Why would you be double taxed? Although the highest marginal rate is more than 45%.
> so your 60-100k
Pretty shitty tech job if that is all you are making.
If you live away from civilization, and I mean really isolated, like 20 hours driving to get to a nice city, you are still gonna pay roughly 1000 dollars for a 1 bedroom apartment
I have friends who are renting a shared flat, works out to ~650 CAD / person, in a nice area (Plateau Mont Royal).
I'm not claiming two data points are representative of the whole distribution, and things are not great at all in terms of inflation / the housing market is tough, but there's no need to resort to gross exaggerations.
Also, Quebec is cheaper than the rest of the country (probably because of language + anti immigration provincial agenda)
I live in a city in the praries away from civilization and pay over 1000 dollars for a 1 bedroom
I gather from the tone and from the fact that this is even being asked that these people are US-born, or at the very least have had some easy path to permanent residency.
The linked article clearly explains that this is aimed at H1-B workers in the US, and it goes into plenty of detail about what Canada is offering them that the US isn't.
> what does Canada offer me?
Cold weather, poutine, "eh", higher taxes, free health care, and American culture light. Whether they want to admit it or not, Canada is basically America with an identity crisis of claiming to not be America.
You can still own guns in Canada and about a quarter of Canadians do.
> Canada’s immigration ministry has been asked by Canadian tech employers to extend a program launched last month that has seen 10,000 foreign tech workers in the U.S apply for permanent residence in Canada.
https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/15s968t/how_canada_...
If you're a native Canadian, you'd behoove yourself to not leave Canada and get a job in the States where you can make way more and have the opportunity to actually afford a house or at least a condo.
> Healthcare If you're a tech worker, you won't be unemployed long enough to even have to worry about losing it and even if you do Obamacare will cover you just fine.
A better way to phrase it is "Canada has employed 10k American tech workers in 48 hours." But that doesn't sound nearly as nefarious.
[…]
2
b: to appropriate (something) as one's own
c: to attract (someone, such as an employee or customer) away from a competitor
A better way to phrase it is "Canada has employed 10k people in America in 48 hours". But that isn't worthy of being pointlessly outraged by everyday language.
But this sounds like an inflow of brains to Canada. Wouldn't this help build Canada's tech industry?
To be clear, this is a super hard problem and I'm not claiming limiting tech labour immigration is a panacea. It's not.
But unless this policy is paired with policies to increase local labour demand as well (which is the real hard problem), all this can do is drive down salaries while exacerbating the housing shortage, which is most acute in the markets where these workers are likely to settle (Vancouver, GTA, and Montreal).
Which is why I say you have to pair this policy with policies to create local demand.
You've gotta give people a reason to build their business in Canada. Simply having a high quality labour pool isn't enough, especially now that remote work is so much more widely available.
Even basic things like getting funding is much harder in Canada because the center of mass is in SV.
But it's a super hard problem and few other places have cracked it (I'm looking at you, Stockholm!)
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U...
Yes yes I know, all of this is by design, there is plenty of demand, and they can get away with it. That doesn't detract from the fact that it is a crock of shit.
Good for Canada. There is a huge market for countries to attract talent simply by treating them humanly, specially as remote work makes people more mobile and wages more competitive.
It's better now, but now Canada also has shit like: "tired of waiting? try assisted suicide".
The US might have high standard costs but at least you have the option to pay for better than standard.
> It's better now, but now Canada also has shit like: "tired of waiting? try assisted suicide".
Canada doesn't have that. That is based on a quote from some fired vetren affairs employee.
> But human rights advocates say the country’s regulations lack necessary safeguards, devalue the lives of disabled people and are prompting doctors and health workers to suggest the procedure to those who might not otherwise consider it.
> Equally troubling, advocates say, are instances in which people have sought to be killed because they weren’t getting adequate government support to live.
> Euthanasia “cannot be a default for Canada’s failure to fulfill its human rights obligations,” said Marie-Claude Landry, the head of its Human Rights Commission.
> Landry said she shares the “grave concern” voiced last year by three U.N. human rights experts, who wrote that Canada’s euthanasia law appeared to violate the agency’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They said the law had a “discriminatory impact” on disabled people and was inconsistent with Canada’s obligations to uphold international human rights standards.
> Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described Canada’s law as “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”
This is a huge problem, and it's one of the reasons that I say Canada is definitely not a perfect solution. I agree with you here.
> The US might have high standard costs but at least you have the option to pay for better than standard.
For a lot of people this is becoming less true over time, depending on where you live. Today there are states where no amount of money can buy you a (legal) abortion, and states where no amount of money can get your child gender affirming care. Tomorrow traveling for that care might be a felony too.
It seems reasonable that if someone is in a position to move to Canada, they are probably in a position to move to California, New York, or some other safer state, but I understand why people might opt to leave the US altogether.
States that do allow your _child_ to get that kind of care are the outlier, not the norm and match the situation in most of the rest of the world. In most of the rest of the world there is an age requirement and usually it's at least 16 and parental consent is still required usually.
And that's a good thing. These people who advocate for the medical and surgical mutilation of children for gender fantasies have completely lost the plot. Cult mentality.
Not every state is Florida. Nobody in the government is targeting me for my identity here.
The fact that you can sponsor your family (parents, etc) is huge.
To each their own. Canada makes mildly different choices than the usa. If you like them great. If you don't, that is cool too, but maybe you shouldn't move here. There is nothing wrong with that, different people like different things.
There's certainly more requirements and limitations placed on you than you may be used to, put in place to ensure everyone else's right to safety isn't infringed upon. It's okay if you're not willing to abide by such restrictions, either by following them or by giving up your guns. That's totally your choice. It just means our country is not compatible with your chosen lifestyle.
I'm not surprised the government is enticing 10k (and potentially more) tech workers who are running out of time on their H1-B to come to Canada.
I only hope these jobs are for skilled workers who already have a decade+ of experience and are specialists, otherwise we're going to have a lot of natural-born Canadians graduating college that will have next to no chance at finding entry-level work.
Sounds like the US economy as well.
edit: color -> collar
Ooof. Quiet part out loud.
Wage suppression + housing bubble, here we go!
Note: I’m not a highly informed person in this regard, but I think this is interesting to consider as a possibility
Our northern regions are rugged, heavily forested, undeveloped, and in the northernmost regions, experiencing loss of permafrost upon which communities and transportation corridors are built.
The southern parts of the country, where most people live, are increasingly experiencing record heat and drought that's straining our cities and threatening crop and grazing land, putting out food system at significant risk.
Maybe very long term northern countries can find a way to benefit from still being habitable, but by then the damage will have already been done.
I would wager that if future Montreal, for example, had winters more similar to today’s New York, far more people would want to live there.
But more importantly, you can't increase your population if your cities have to ration the water or food supply because climate change has destroyed both. And mass migration is not going to happen without destroying lives and livelihoods.
I think you are overestimating how much climate change will affect the food and water supply in North America. There will be huge problems but the apocalyptic idea you seem to have is more of a pop culture notion than a scientific one.
After all the forests burn?
Look up videos on youtube that describe why US geography is overpowered and then see which of those reasons might apply to Canada if, say, sea levels rise and temperatures increase.
Other important factors: coastal access, number/size/depth of sea ports, current and future demographics, river systems, culture, natural resources, trade partners, military, economic system, access to nuclear weapons, military alliances, etc.
Importing migrant workers drives down wages. Whether you think that's smart or not depends on whether you side with workers or business owners.
If you want some proof that I’m not just making that up, here’s a paper showing that highly skilled migrants end up raising wages for native workers: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/679061
Agglomeration effects are very powerful and this seems to be what this Canadian policy is trying to harness
Same number when Americans said they’d move to Canada after trump was elected.
Zero