Canada has fewer entrepreneurs today than it did 20 years ago
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Instead they asked 4 professors of entrepreneurship & govt. ministers who probably weren't entrepreneurs. These people mentioned twice that one of the reasons for low entrepreneurship is because unemployment is too low and jobs pay too well... the whole push for this is coming from callous bureaucrats who've never been anywhere close to entrepreneurship who apparently believe its so bad that the only reason someone would do it is if they have no other options..
What a joke.. it's hard to believe this level of stupidity , it might just be malice (a pretext to justify raising interest rates and increase unemployment)
In all fairness, isn't that a legitimate reason? If you could make a very comfy life and retire early I think many would be entrepreneurs would take the easy way out. Of course, some want the big cash out or strongly believe in their mission, but many people are there for the money.
Of course, I can't verify if wages in Canada are indeed "too well. Seems like an outdated statement if the economy up there is anything close to the US's. Legitimate reason with incorrect data is simply a misguided take.
Canada has a cost of living crisis, and an entire generation has been priced out of the possibility of owning a home.
One can survive better than in the US at the extremely low end, and being sick won't kill or bankrupt you.
But nobody is living a "comfy" life without busting and hustling.
Engineers in big tech in Canada can comfortably own ONE house.
Relative to the baseline, it's definitely cushy. Relative to each other...not quite.
Plenty of people living comfy.
But for “a lot of people live with their parents” that’s actually a sign that things are not going well at all. This can be seen all over Europe, and just means that people cannot afford to move out, not that they like living with their parents. If/when they inherit their parent’s house they might be in their fifties or sixties, and most of their prime life is gone by then.
Canada is very multicultural, and a lot of people choose to live with their parents as a matter of preference.
On your second point, I don't see what being in the "prime of life" has to do with living with your parents or not. But even that isnt the case , for example my friend's grandma is moving into a retirement home so they're moving into her old house.
And since Canada's population is shrinking, this is a significant amount of families that don't have to worry about housing ever.
However, Canada has lots of immigrants, and it's very hard for immigrants to break into the housing market. Both of these are true.
It’s a lot of work and there’s plenty of money to be made as a corporate drone.
If you’re a corporate drone, someone else owns your time. Want to take some time off? You need permission from your employer. Want to do something differently? Need permission. Want to think for yourself or take initiative? Frowned upon at best, forbidden at worst.
Nothing wrong with one or the other, but it doesn’t suit everyone.
Of all the criticisms I would have of Canadian work culture, lack of autonomy is not one of them.
The political branch of the government does not control interest rates, nor have any say in them. The Prime Minister cannot raise or lower interest rates.
This is the same in most western democracies, as such things cannot be left to political control.
"The Bank of Canada is a special type of Crown corporation, owned by the federal government, but with considerable independence to carry out its responsibilities."
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/about
They also add: "The Governor and Senior Deputy Governor are appointed by the Bank's Board of Directors (with the approval of Cabinet), not by the federal government."
... and the BoD are appointed by cabinet.
Does the political branch make the decisions? No. But they choose the people that do!
This by no means implies any control over interest rates. At all.
People are appointed, and that's where political input ends. And those appointed stay appointed, are not chosen lightly, markets do not react well to poor choice.
By your metric, you'd think our Supreme court judges were puppets too. They aren't.
People may have political leanings, but understand, that is not the same as allowing input where it is not allowed.
The government cannot interfere with the judicial branch, nor with fiscal policy. To do so, renders it a banana republic, or dictatorship, any attempts would be disaster, for those appointed take this very seriously.
A core part of the job is to ignore ministers, the PMO, and so on.
It is entirely independent.
You don't need someone that will take in your input when you install people that are going to do what you want in the first place.
Look, I know it's fashionable to claim that everyone just ignores their roles via legislation (such as the bank of canada act), ignores change and what's happening in the world around them, to instead act as puppets, but that's just not how it works.
In the US supreme court judges almost always agree with whatever position is favoured by the party that appointed them, even if nominally independent.
For example: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jun/23/trey-wingo...
That'd only be the case if there were no policies with bi-partisan support. How many of those 9-0 are for politically contentious issues?
And you're confusing political leanings, with influence. Political leanings which can, and have changed over careers. Not to mention, some of them outlive everyone who appointed them.
The Governor(not director) os not appointed by the government. Nor fired.
You need to read up on this. Please. You're just making stuff up.
The Canadian entrepreneur problem is the TSX problem: it's a struggle to convince oneself to invest in Canada, because generally the returns are lackluster. Rail, Banks, Oil and Gas are the consistent winners, all well-connected and deeply rooted, and rare is the startup that becomes a star on the TSX.
It's not that there isn't enough starving and unemployed talent, it's that there's something about Canada that suffocates and debilitates small and medium companies.
On the face of it, Canada should be a hotbed of entrepreneurship. The country has full access to the US market, has a good standard of living, has capitalism with good social nets, has great rule of law, well educated residents, allows qualified immigrants...
Every major economy is aging. Surely this cannot be the answer why entrepreurship in Canada is down.
Also, I object to the metric of entrepreneurs as a percentage of population used in the article. It is about how many successful companies are being born. You could have a very high entrepreurship rate with a high failure rate or you could have a low entrepreneurship rate with a high success rate. At the end it is the product of the two i.e. sustainable, successful businesses born per year that is a better metric. We also need to take future profitability and future-impact into account. Giving birth to one OpenAI per year is arguably better than getting 100 new dry-cleaner businesses per-year.
The article could have been better.
Canada sells and sees itself as the good boys. The conformists. The least likely to rock the boat. The opposite of that Apple ad essentially
You can see that by how often they will go with proprietary solution, even for their startups/SMEs. "Oh why don't we do this in .NET" even when there are plenty of other solutions
They will only risk the water only when they see other people way down. I'd say even Europe is not that bad in that sense.
That's an interesting idea for a metric: how many programming languages has Canada created relative to similarly sized countries?
Nobody is claiming there's some sort of genetic difference that causes different levels of entrepreneurship, it's clearly all cultural. Take the Canadian out of Canada, make them report to American bosses and clearly they can create popular new software, no different to Europeans or Indians or Chinese ... the differences therefore must be related to government policy and culture.
By default, most of the top-of-field Canadians work in the US because it's at least 50% more profitable (among other reasons).
I agree with the premise about culture generally but you can't attribute all of it to culture. A great deal can be attributed to money and "ecosystems" around certain industries.
I can’t speak to the other external factors, but I think brain drain to the US is quite significant.
Well schooled residents, at least. Canadians have more schooling than anywhere else in the world according to the OECD. How well they are educated is questionable, however. Canada lacks the markers of an educated society – incomes are low and stagnant, very little political engagement, etc.
> Giving birth to one OpenAI per year is arguably better than getting 100 new dry-cleaner businesses per-year.
The article is written through the eyes of BDC. Is one OpenAI actually better for them than 100 dry cleaning businesses? Would an OpenAI-like business even seek funding through BDC when they can just as easily secure a payday from Microsoft?
As an Old Worlder I would like to know what this means. If you have a website or a SaaS and are located in Canada, do you mean you can sell freely, wothout restriction, and without regulatory burden, the same as if you were operating within the US?
What per capita metrics should be used for this?
Do you reckon there is room for innovation here?
That kind of world is an inevitable outcome of large bureaucracies and over-reliance on qualifications. You don’t just get idiocracy, you get Untruths and policies oriented around expanding the bureaucracy rather than addressing problems. See also: Lysenkoism in the USSR, EU’s model of funding startups through grants.
I honestly think this one of the things the US does way, way better than other developed countries. We pay a price in cronyism and corruption, but we actually let industry experts with real experience both advise on policy and take key government positions. We don’t pretend you need a PhD in X to be knowledgeable about X to nearly the same extent as Canada and the Eu.
You can’t just stick a midwit in a university for 10 years and expect them to be anything other than a midwit, and you can’t expert an organization that values compliance and internal politics more than performance and effectiveness to produce performant or effective leaders. You can’t bureaucracy your way into a free market either.
What I take issue with is the kind of idiocracy you get when experts are identified according to “an uninformed person’s idea of an expert” rather than actual expertise. Bureaucracies’ ideas of expertise are usually “objective” like a degree or certification. The thing about degrees and certifications is that they are not nearly as difficult to get or indicative of knowledge/intelligence as an average person thinks they are. Especially with regard to more practical degrees like business and engineering, they simply cannot really teach you the same kinds of things you learn from actually working in the field.
And who can argue with the results? Several promising entrepreneurs each year take advantage of these critical programs to consult with pro-business advisers who assist in job creation by recommending they apply for 3k tax breaks.
You can't fund a "news" organization with public money and expect them to be an independent agency that holds the government's feet to the fire. They don't do much more than add a thin veneer of objectivity and independent analysis for any significant government initiative.
The article posted above is just a small piece of evidence for the broken nature of the media. There is a torrent more spewing out daily.
Personally, I have a problem with the viewpoint that democratic governments are some sort of adversary when in actuality, private businesses are the entities that have no accountability and we have zero direct control over. I agree there should be independent criticism of government, but IMO state media from a democratic government is naturally going to be better overall than only having private media.
I don’t see people getting shot nearly as much in Canada.
I don’t see as many exploited illegal immigrants in Canada.
To fight corporate greed and capitalistic cynicism we do need government.
Compared to US, I suppose. Canadian homicide rate is comparable to Balkan countries, each famous in their own way of dysfunction and corruption.
Drop the word "illegal" and you will see a lot. How do you expect illegal immigrants to get to Canada when they only border US?
The final point is quite amusing since it's the Canadian Government and the regulatory capture it creates that screws up a lot of things in Canada and pushes prices to insane levels (mobile phone plans, housing as two examples that came to my mind) while also depressing wages via immigration.
At 2.1/100,000 it’s a hair above the 2021 Balkans average, which is, frankly, quite low and just a little higher than the Northern Europe average.
> each famous in their own way of dysfunction and corruption.
Yes, but not for high homicide rates.
What’s the point you are trying to make?
[*] For some low standard of good
Here is a counter example. Cuba sees ~0 Rhinecarops homicide, ergo it's just as developed as Canada and Belgium.
There are major differences between legal immigrants, who have to pass some pretty strict tests of suitability, and uncontrolled immigration. Legal immigrants have most of the rights and obligations of citizens, including access to healthcare and paying taxes.
> How do you expect illegal immigrants to get to Canada when they only border US?
Canada has thankfully developed enough by now to have airports.
> I don't know why they [sic] are homeless
You said it yourself: expensive real estate.
Truly spoken like someone who has no information about illegal immigration. I suppose the border control just lets everyone in? Or flights to Canada just let everyone board without checking their visas? Or Canadian embassies just throw around visas without checking for illegal immigration risk? For those who don't need visas, anyone interested in illegally immigrating from this list of countries (https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...) are much better served by buying a bus ticket to Germany.
Quote from this [0] article: "But in the past 10 years, visa overstays in the United States have outnumbered border crossings by a ratio of about 2 to 1, according to Robert Warren, who was for a decade the director of the statistics division at the agency that has since been renamed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services".
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/re...
> There are no accurate figures representing the number or composition of undocumented immigrants residing in Canada. A guesstimate of about half a million has been proposed nationally [1, 2], but this number varies among other sources which suggest anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 undocumented workers [3–5]. In 2003, Ontario’s Construction Secretariat purported that there were 76,000 non-status immigrants in Ontario’s construction industry alone, while other sources confirmed that at least 36,000 failed refugee applicants had never been deported, and another 64,000 individuals overstayed their work, student or visitor visas in 2002 [5]. If it is assumed that workers are accompanied by family, the numbers in Ontario would rise to the highest figure previously estimated for all of Canada. With respect to settlement, Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto have the highest number of undocumented migrants [6], with nearly 50% residing in Toronto alone [7].
The total number if illegal immigrants is probably around 10% of the yearly intake of legal immigrants.
Whereas US keeps going for new records: https://www.statista.com/statistics/329256/alien-apprehensio...
It's immature and you can do better than that.
Let's remember the root claim that is being disputed:
> How do you expect illegal immigrants to get to Canada when they only border US?
There is not a large land border with Mexico in Canada, but Canadians are happy enough to exploit what they call temporary foreign workers who do jobs they don't want to do and have rights which fall short of a citizens on paper and in practice.
This difference seems less due to Canada's superior nature than it seems due to Canada being surrounded by oceans on three sides and by a wealthier country on the fourth side. In fact I think Canadians would do well to keep in mind that they don't face the same issues that other countries do before passing judgement on immigration issues. Almost all immigrants to Canada are immigrants Canada explicitly welcomed to the country who met every qualification.
Who stands to gain? Without TFWs the minimum wage (or the amount actually paid for workers) would have to rise - supply and demand.
For other things, like the aforementioned jobs at Tim Hortons, hiring temporary foreign worker is nothing but a wage suppression scheme meant to solve the "problem" of Tim Horton's being unprofitable and locations shutting down in a low unemployment environment, and the whole "temporary" thing is something to be worked around.
The previous government got in a world of shit for doing the latter and eventually stopped and banned much of the wage suppression aspect of this program. A few years back the incumbent government figured enough people aren't paying attention and re-legalised the fast food underclass again to suppress wages to address the "labour shortage" because fast food workers were faint making more than minimum wage and shudder taking a greater share of the profits of the fast food business.
Anecdotally, I've seen that fast food example often. Most of the time they think they're going to get PR in the long run.
Further, there's a lot of these fast food restaurants working employees extra hours off the table on cash
Full disclaimer, I consider myself politically moderate/centrist and still think CBC is very valuable. And again, I understand everyone has different priorities in life and Canada might not be suitable for them. But implying “we have it the worst and nobody would want to live here if they had a way to get out” is also wrong.
‘Government intervention’ isn’t the same as a government who works to support the needs of citizens.
Canadians strike me as a very undemanding nation. I mean, they are ready to go through whatever inconvenience a big corp may force them into, and still be fine about it. To Canadians, it's just the way things are, inevitable evil. At the same time, an entrepreneur frequently starts by targeting a market niche and offering better quality or better service or a novel way of doing things. However, a market niche assumes that there are consumers with a niche demand. But if consumers are undemanding and are OK with keeping paying for something subpar, this leaves us with not so many market niches and thus opportunities.
At the same time, doing business is great in Canada. The tax system is simple (just 3 taxes). Reduced tax rates for small businesses. Registering a business can be done online for a small fee. The banks are OK. Abundance of decent business-related services - accountants, designers, etc. It's relatively easy to sell to the government. Finding a good lawyer is a tough problem, though. But I suspect it's a problem everywhere.
PS. I run a technology company based in Canada.
Canada is just 3 monopolies in a trench coat and there is nothing we can do about it.
Of course, it's not always like that. But in my experience such simplified purchases were sufficiently frequent to (pleasantly) surprise me.
Coziness is the biggest hurdle. As a programmer, I can make a really good salary at a tech giant. Even after 4 years of grinding and finally achieving product market fit and growth, my wife doesn't understand why I'm doing a startup. Life could be so much easier working for Google.
Heck everyone has a job here. The 2/1,000 missing entrepreneurs don't have an incentive to start. I'm from Ottawa and all my friends work for the federal government with big fat pensions and doing boring work (my perspective mind you). But they have great family lives, lots of vacation and great outside of work experiences. Why the hell would they jump into entrepreneurship? Worst of all, the government workforce is growing faster than that of the private sector!
What worries me most is the future - a country cannot get wealthier nor innovate without entrepreneurs. It is s a real concern indeed.
A lot of that though is simply not wanting to be rich. Americans truly want lambo type wealth. I can't say I have met someone born here who wanted that. We are content to own a house and go to Mexico.
Or, just running STRs in the big cities.
p. 10 here: https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2016/ed/bgrd/backgroundf...
When your residential construction market is so on fire that you don't even build hotel space, you end up with STRs as a symptom.
But isn't housing ridiculously expensive in the parts of Canada where jobs are concentrated (which I'm pretty sure are around Toronto and Vancouver)? Pardon me if wrong, I'm American ;)
For the record, I want those things too, it's just that housing in California is ridiculously unaffordable
For most people, yes it is quite expensive. If you are looking at techies specifically, it is still affordable.
For typical knowledge jobs or skilled labour jobs, it is affordable as well if you pair up with someone.
Average SW developer salary 95,000
I would say yes.... this is very unaffordable.
The current mortgage on a house of that price is around $8,500 per month
Possibly because the ambitious people moved to the US.
By what metric are you making your claims?
My experience after living here for 5 years is that the Canadian and BC government deliver an incredible level of service compared to other jurisdictions I’ve lived in.
Just an example, I put in a request to order a $40 network module to replace a failed one. On our side it's already painful enough, I had to get approvals from 3 different managers that have to align all of the budgeting before bringing it forward to the federal government's representative for approval. The rep in tern has to bring it to his bosses for approval as well.
Typically this takes 12 weeks but this was put in as a critical priority because this was impacting about a hundred people. Probably costing the federal government (cause they're footing the bill) about $12,500 a week in lost productivity because our teams can't do their job properly. Thus their director got to it in a blazing fast 4 weeks.
$40 part. $50,000 in lost productivity because they couldn't get a $40 approval for done faster then 4 weeks.
The other anecdote I've had is with the Canadian Firearms Center in Miramichi. For those that are unaware, Canadians are required to be licensed under a federal program to own a firearm privately. Miramichi handles much of the paperwork for firearms registration. This was a while ago but last time I saw, they were still manually entering in data from paperwork but also from electronic submission as well. Stuff that could be readily automated and something I demo'd in an afternoon.
As it turns out, the inefficiency is intentional because there's a very real fear among the line staff of job reductions if they get too productive per person. And there's not many jobs in Miramichi that pay as well as the federal government (or at least that was the case when I was visiting there probably 20 years ago). So unfortunately there is justification to be as inefficient as possible. But it's always left me wondering how much how much further this attitude extends to other government departments.
Meanwhile my Canadian tax return is pretty straightforward: open my tax app, click some download function, it pulls in stuff my bank/employer/etc has already electronically submitted to government.
The most annoying part is calculating "Adjusted Cost Basis" for cap gains/losses on stock sales. It's technically fairer than a simpler FIFO approach, but brokers/gov refuse to understand that most people do everything through 1 broker and calculate these figures for us.
Bureaucracy will always seek its own survival, even at the cost of its chartered mission.
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlm...
Kinda doubt it, there's already a mandatory wait time for getting your license. If anything Ottawa wanted them to process the paper work faster, I just don't know if they could have done so.
Circa early 2000's the Canadians were in the process of trying to get long guns registered (handguns and some other types of firearms always had to be registered), but it turned into a debacle. The cost to build the program should've been $119 million, with fees covering $117 million. The cost that the auditor general found was $140 million registration fees trying to cover $1 billion in costs that she could account for at the time. Didn't help that her team didn't have time to crunch the numbers. CBC went in and estimated that it was closer to $2 billion dollars[2].
The program was already controversial in the first place, but the problems just kept getting problem after problem thrown at it. In protest a man named Brian Richard Buckley sent in firearms registration for a Black and Decker soldering heat gun. There were already huge error rate in the registry at the time; something like 70% error rate of licenses and 90% error rate for registrations but that little stunt he pulled revealed a much deeper problem occurring. I can't find the article anymore but the backlog had become so severe that the staff were instructed to no longer validate any of the information they were getting, even if it didn't make sense.
All that to say that say, if things were being run inefficiently intentionally, that probably would've just given even more opposition even more ammunition to embarrass the government at a time when they were already taking a beating about the mismanagement of the new firearms program. So I sincerely doubt it was a mandate.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/auditor-general-takes-aim-at-...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-...
Overall nearly a thousand dollars in salary being wasted in a single morning because the idea of not taking a break at exactly 10:30am instead of finishing the job and taking a break at 11:00am instead is inconceivable.
There is absolutely zero incentive for efficiency and motivated individuals will actually burn out from being in a culture where trying to improve anything or making your colleagues look bad by being too productive creates a toxic work environment.
That’s not to mention the absurd “use it or lose it” budgeting system, whereby if you need to replace a million dollar piece of equipment every 5 years, you need to piss away over a million dollars every year to ensure you’ll have the budget when it’s actually required.
Whenever I see people ragging on governments as though they're automatically inefficient, I laugh because the implication that "private sector is always more efficient" is laughably stupid and ill-informed. People will take their liberties wherever they can get them.
On the other hand, when public sector burns through money that money isn’t theirs. It was mostly taken away by force through taxes from private citizens. So even of they burn through any money with inefficiency, corruption, bad decision making or anything, they can demand the same or usually more of the same money next year. And next year. All the while that bureaucracy is growing and private sector is shrinking.
Sure, but sooner or later is quite likely to be at least a few decades from now, since this is mostly a large organization sort of thing and large companies don't tend to vanish overnight.
If a private company is burning money slow or fast it doesn't really matter. It's their money, it's not my money.
But when I see spectacularly bad/expensive (usually both) projects financed with taxpayer's money, I definitely do want some scrutiny and responsibility. Unfortunately we don't get any of that because it's not in their interest to do so.
I've worked at two very large tech companies in the past. At both shops I have experiences that make that $50k in lost productivity look like a joke.
First company invested tens if not hundreds of millions chasing the idea of scaled clustered deployment using Spark. I'm sure they saw some kind of technology return but the actual investment was never returned nearly a decade on and turned out to be a blunder.
Second company had a far worse procurement issue than what you describe in your post. $50k in lost productivity would've been welcomed. They had a hardware failure in one of their datacentres affecting the cooling systems. Some customer systems impacted but mostly internal stuff. It took about seven weeks to replace during which time hundreds of employees basically got to twiddle their thumbs.
Yeah, it shouldn't take four weeks to get approval for a $40 part but let's not pretend these kind of problems don't also happen in the private sector too. It's one of the reasons I left and won't go back -- I shouldn't need paperwork signed in triplicate to get a new monitor.
The difference is that the government's employees are paid from taxes collected from productive companies, aka companies that create jobs and achieve a profit big enough to warrant paying taxes in the first place.
A private sector company, unless it is subsidized in some way or has a monopoly on a certain market will eventually try to rectify these inefficiencies because its makes it more resilient in the fight against it's competitors.
On the other hand, there is no incentive on the government side to make things more efficient.
If a government looses money, they can just borrow more, increase the national debt and sweep any kind of reform under the rug. Because of this lack of incentives, some state and government agencies act as de facto subsidized job's programs.
It's the same problem in many western nation, just look at how many people are employed in France by the government.
Many basic services are actually decaying but the government keeps hiring more people.
If we remove the employees who work as teachers, cops, in the military, and all other essential services, the rest of them, I am just not sure what the hell they do with their time.
My point is that it should be a duty of the government to be as efficient as possible. To do more with less, should be a priority unless the tasks require more people.
So I can understand when people complain of the inefficiency of a government agency.
The public sector is insulated from suffering that kind of failure. In some ways it's good; there's no real way to run a police or military force at a profit, but both are vital. But in other ways it's problematic when major failures occur and the consequences of such are are just shrugged off.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-iss... $2.4 billion for a federal HR pay system that still doesn't work.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-... $2 billion for a gun registry database that ultimately had to be dismantled because no one could find any evidence that the accomplished the goal of making Canadians safer.
Because of waiting for internal approvals? Or because the lead time on datacenter equipment is quite long?
> I shouldn't need paperwork signed in triplicate to get a new monitor.
So in your new public sector job how easy is it to get a new monitor?
Problem with Canada is the cost of living is too high. And there is more money if you move south. Easy. A job in US would easily pay you twice if you are in tech. Why would you want to live in Canada? Oh did I say the taxes. For a millennial,ife is way more harder.
Your 1.1 million dollar home you buy today will be worth 5 million in 50 years at least 2 million in 20 years. Still as good of an investment as ever.
It's like bitcoin sure it would have been great buying coins for 5 cents and today and you would be a billionaire but you weren't able to make that bet. If you want to buy at the 5 cent level you need to find another coin because that opportunity passed. You weren't able to buy a home in 2010 or 1947 so you are never getting those prices again. You can buy today but don't expect the same prices on the same properties as if you lived in the past
"Go somewhere else" - They did that - and Halifax housing prices tripled in 3 years, from 310% annual average family income to 840% annual average family income.
We need to build more houses or have fewer people, but instead we're slowing down on building and importing new people as fast as we can
Someone who says the solution to the housing problem is to move somewhere horrible with no jobs, no culture, no services, horrible schools so that my children can waste their future, never mind if I want to go out and do something one in a while. These places are so awesome that the depression and suicide rates are far higher than in real cities.
Maybe you like living in such places. But the solution to the housing crisis cannot be to give up on having a reasonable life for most people.
The stated solution was always to move to where the jobs are. Perhaps counterintuitively, the trouble with high housing prices is that even the job providers don't want to live there. In fact, through the mid-to-late 2010s as Vancouver and Toronto became unmanageable, the strongest job market in Canada was in a predominantly rural area with an average home price of $200,000.
The trouble is that people eventually take notice, so it is always a moving target. The average home in that rural region is now $700,000 as people have pushed their way in to bask in the job opportunity. Which, of course, also means the job market is no longer as strong (although remains stronger than a lot of country according to September data – the decline takes time) as job providers have started moving to more prosperous ground again. You can't say "move to <location>, problem solved" because as soon as you do, <location> will necessarily need to change to somewhere else.
A story as old as time, of course. Canada wouldn't exist at all if people weren't always needing to find a new location. That is life, I suppose.
The culture argument is biased. People leaving Montreal for hogtown in the 80s probably felt the same way. But Toronto's cultural aura grew. Saying that the culture of say Miramichi or Yellowknife is horrible and your kids future will be wasted if you don't live in downtown Toronto is a little naive.
Young people are flocking to smaller towns because of affordability. Culture is being made there. Why do you want to live with older folks and try to relive there heyday in places they made big?
For jobs. Stick to remote. The longer these in person positions go vacant the more likely they become remote jobs. Be part of the solution.
Growing with a small city as an investment vehicle seems like it would run into problems predicting which small city is going to see significant growth.
Canadian humor is weird.
Using the most typical US salary as a guide, it would require the combined salaries of 6.3 people to afford a $500k home. After adding insurance, maintenance, fees, property taxes, etc - I'm thinking more like 8 people (10 in FL).
ref: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-do-you-need-to-ea...
ref: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/common-jo...
The $500,000 is usually carried by two. $250,000 mortgage while expensive is still much cheaper than current rental values.
If houses were just 500,000 and there were jobs in those areas I think we WOULD see more entrepreneurs because that was pretty much the conditions 10 years ago that TFA mentioned
It's a cultural problem. Hustle culture and entrepreneurship is respected in China. That's not the case in Canada.
Yes housing in Canada is messed up. But very well paid tech workers are actually some of the few young people that can still make it work.
Heck, I know some millennials that managed to buy in the Bay Area where it's even worse (they work at Tesla).
Just to give you context, median software Engineer salary in Canada is 95200. An average townhome in any of the cities now is over 600k easily, forget about Toronto and Vancouver where most likely those tech jobs are. Mortgage for a place like this in the current rate is easily around 2500-3000. Add in car, insurance, electricity, cost of daycare. And then see how much of after tax income can you afford to bring home.
The comment you replied to said this:
> Coziness is the biggest hurdle. As a programmer, I can make a really good salary at a tech giant.
I'm in no way implying that requiring a big tech salary is a _good_ thing (obviously it's not).. I'm simply agreeing with the original statement that it stifles startups.
Is it? If adjusted by median income Vancouver and Toronto are both more expensive than San Francisco or San Jose.
1 in every 4 people work for the Gov in Ontario and it is increasing. An elementary school teacher, fireman, Police officer and even some postal workers make more than most programmers. HS teachers retired with million dollar pension at 57 and collect 60-70k a year. There are regular cops making 120k a year. There are more STEM jobs in some US cities than there are in entire provinces. There is no work in Canada unless you find a Gov job. Private industry pays like shit in Canada, it's embarrassing. Everyone I know flees to the US first chance they get. Canadian private industry pays like shit and most folks are either slaves or under employed if they are lucky enough to find work.
It is an incredibly bad situation across the entire country.
If this was a major factor then it would also apply to entrepreneurs in the US, yet it doesn't.
People don't make decisions in a vacuum. They make decisions amongst a set of choices.
> Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary toil …
We can see its effects in the long run: promoting conformity at any cost, losing ability to innovate and improve.
[1] https://aeon.co/essays/why-chinese-minds-still-bear-the-long...
The other is rents have increased that whole time, who can afford to be an entrepreneur when your lease will eat you alive before you ever get off the ground. If the argument is “aha - but Canadians could start an innovative company that relies on remote work and thus avoid such expensive leases” what is the appeal of starting such a business in Canada compared to starting one in the United States where success is far more likely due to a larger market and more pro-business environment?
Finally inequality and monopolization is just much worse than 20 years ago internationally. Why be David fighting Goliath when the deck is stacked against you? I’d be kind of surprised if the trend in the article isn’t happening internationally.
The articles suggestion that Canadians just don’t have good enough soft skills to be entrepreneurs is just insulting blaming of non-existent individual deficits that ignores systemic issues.
Interesting, do you have a source for this? Would love to read more about it
I'd suggest a more constructive comment might be to find an example source and ask whether it is consistent with the reasoning. These "source?" comments are low effort and degrade the quality of conversation.
Understanding whether we are looking at causation or correlation is important here. Canada is neighbours with the largest economy in the world, with the Canadian economy being heavily influenced by the American economy. Quite often public programs are introduced simply to be competitive because the private sector is not stepping up. (At least that is the perception. That perception is important polticially.)
In any case, their claims seem to line up with the Statscan data to me, and I don't see where else they would have gotten this data from.
However, what is "stepping up," in the private sector, as if it involves putting down our cigars and caviar and having our butlers open the jobs lever a bit, I'd suggest there is a broken ontology at play.
Sept 2023 - Public sector employees: 4,291.7; Private sector employees: 13,293.4; Self-employed: 2,685.1
Sept 2003 - Public sector employees: 2,945.8; Private sector employees: 10,298.9; Self-employed: 2,430.0
Difference - Public sector employees: 1,345.9; Private sector employees: 2994.5; Self-employed: 255.1
% growth - Public sector employees: 45.7%; Private sector employees: 29.1%; Self-employed: 10.5%
Where did all the jobs come from? Are people not retiring? Spending less time in schooling?
It's wasn't a massive decrease in unemployment that could explain that.
The remaining 26% is the real question - who did huge hiring over the past 20 years?
Are you implying that social programs are here to help to private sector?
...so the logic goes
That isn't the idea. The services are for the people, not to help you line your pockets.
Education, research and policing growth slower than all other ministry (although police funding seems to be catching up).
There is also administrative bloat, mostly due to more rules, but it seems quite contained here to ecology and urbanism (except in the education ministry, which employ now more administrators than teachers)
You're saying the government saw there are no entrepreneurs so they increased government jobs???
I'll point out that none of the beliefs expressed so far actually contradict each-other. Less entrepreneurs could mean more public sector jobs. More public sector jobs could mean less entrepreneurs. Third order effects could mean less entrepreneurs as well.
We turned to the US to get funding (besides our own money). TinySeed specializes in boostrapped B2B SaaS. They have an incubator program that is really good and got us going.
We're at the point of getting a line of credit and again have to deal with Canadian banks. Again the BDC cannot help more than any other bank.
We also looked at government tech subsidies and grants. Honestly, there is so much paperwork that takes time away from gaining customers and growing the business. We did not pursue.
Maybe when you reach 20+ staff these things will come to help you. Especially if you have someone to manage it. But when you get started, you're on your own.
This was over a decade ago. Did not come away with a positive impression of the tech startup scene in Canada. Yours and other comments since have only fed that.
I wonder how that compares with, for example, joining an YC batch, or talking to multiple VCs in search of financing
For a Main St type business, rents, costs and regulations are too high.
Rents again come into play for the entrepreneur, being so insanely high that they discourage risk taking and encourage people to stay at their current relatively high paying company.
As with so many things in Canada it all comes back to housing lol.
We will not have more entrepreneurship until it is dramatically cheaper to live in Canada, and that means lowering one of the biggest costs that people have, which is housing.
I don't want to be a part of the US, I hate their culture and politics. But the local elites here benefit too much from having their own little closed market to monopolize and control.
The grass is always greener!
Universal healthcare is good but it's been underfunded for decades, slowly coming apart, and inconsistent across the country.
Public education is definitely in a better state than the US, though. And I'd argue our higher education / university system is superior in both cost and quality. So far.
Culturally, Canada might be in a better state. The culture wars not as pronounced (depending on where you are). Abortion rights etc. mostly a given. Gay marriage and rights pretty much unassailable at this point. Legal cannabis, etc. etc.
But in terms of bread and butter supports for regular working people, it's not that great. Though of course, again, the health care thing is a big caveat. US healthcare is great if you're upper middle class, wayyyyy better than anything you'd get here. But the average working class person is definitely better off in Canada compared to the US, on the healthcare front.
Anyways, housing prices here are way worse (relative to earning potential) than any American city other than I guess Manhattan, at this point. People in the Bay Area complain, but they really have nothing on the GTA or Vancouver lower mainland.
On the healthcare aspect, there is no doubt the poorest people in Canada are the EU are treated better than the poorest in the US. I do have a suspicion that as the universal systems reach a breaking point they start to look a bit more like the US - where people pay more if they use more - to encourage better economization of scarce healthcare resources. I have heard some really fucked stories of cancer treatment delays leading to death which I don’t think is as common here (they will treat you in the US, but you might go bankrupt). It’s like, would you rather be rationed and die or get treatment and be bankrupt? I’d prefer to live myself.
It's a population clustered near the border and really should be seen as one that is culturally and economically contiguous with the US, just not politically. In terms of metropolitan regions, much of Canada is really much the same as the US.
On healthcare / public services, I will give you examples of where the US liberal biases about Canada just don't line up.
At the tail end of the COVID-19 crisis, spring 2021 I went across to go skiing with a friend from Albany. I needed a test to get back across the border to get home. I was able to just go to a US pharmacy and get a molecular test for free, with almost instant results. I was told that if I tested positive I could get anti-virals, for free, immediately, without even showing citizenship. Meanwhile in Ontario all public testing for COVID-19 was cancelled before the end of 2020. My elderly parents in Alberta just tested positive but had to fight to get anti-virals because despite being 1 year shy of 80 they didn't qualify unless they had pronounced comorbidities. So... a country without a universal public health care system was able to offer much better universal coverage (where it mattered) than here.
Another example: say you wanted a blood test for your kid to test blood lead levels. No doctor will offer that here, really. You'd have to really lobby for it and have a serious acute reason for it-- despite all the older cities here being full of lead pipes. I was down in the Finger Lakes a few years ago and there were signs for public clinics all over offering this as a free service.
It is by no means a black and white situation. There are many aspects in which many liberal US states outdo Canadian provinces on certain social programs.
I can’t even remember what we are discussing. In summation, I love the US, but this thread has really given me ammo to counteract the cocktail party liberals who worship Canada.
I know because I am one of those people.
For example, I have participated in numerous entrepreneurship accelerator programs, as have my friends. How many of us spent any time on our companies after finishing the accelerators? Zero. I know people who put the winning of 200K on their resume, went to get a corporate job, and just returned the 200K in prize money later, as the purpose of the prize was to be publicly named as winning the prize. This person now works for RBC as a software developer.
I won 20K with a friend a few weeks ago for our startup (which was generated just for the competition). We intend to hand the money back at the progress deadline, as he is a new grad and it helped him to get a job.
Canadians are also very suspicious of people who do go into business for themselves. American companies will hire entrepreneurs. Going to YC is not a career derailer. In Canada, we would assume that if you started a company that you couldn't find a job. I have been in the (virtual) room as resumes are tossed as the hiring manager assumed "Co-Founder" was just a synonym for unemployed.
Anecdotally, Canadians need more money to work for a startup, not less as in the USA. Americans take pay cuts to work for startups in the hope of a giant return. Canadians demand a pay premium to work for a startup, over say RBC.
The other issue is that Canadian consumers also do not take risks. We don't try new products or switch suppliers. Consider our high internet costs. There are tons of other options, but even when CBC went out and told people about them, they refused to switch as they didn't want to take the risk.
That's a 6 year old article. Most alt/independent vendors have basically been gutted or acquired by the incumbent oligopolists.
Was with 2 providers (Teksavvy and eBox) that jacked up their prices above what the "flanker" providers by incumbents were charging. There used to be quite a savings, but that's vaporized.
Coextro might be worth investigating, I'll admit. Thought they only did own-fibre to bigger buildings.
I don't quite know why the culture is like this, and I'm not sure it's a problem. Useful to take a step back and realize that Canada is a very different culture than the US, and there simply is a different value system.
Summed up in:
> A lot of this is simply that Canadians do not desire to be rich and prioritize not being poor.
I imagine selection bias is a lot of it. Lots of immigrants for both, but the USA is where you go to seek fame and fortune. Canada is the nice and stable answer.
Canada is arguably also socially neutral on wealth. In the USA, wealth earns you respect, influence, straightforward political influence, etc. In Canada, wealth is just wealth. If anything, we are a bit suspicious of how you earned it and who you hurt to do that.
I mean... People fled to beCanada to not be part of the us.
Now we reap the rewards. America is a resounding success, and Canada is a success because it is next to America.
Citation needed. Not only does RBC not actually pay particularly well, but Canadian startups pay awful compared to US ones. I've worked in both US and Canadian startups, and the latter was an incestuous joke, with everyone so delighted they weren't working for a crappy webdev or bank or insurance company that they were willing to put up with all sorts of crap.
I’ve consulted for several Canadian tech companies and their finances often seemed remarkably poor. I know some are doing well; I’m more so speaking about “regular people” businesses. Small private companies with staff around 10-20 people.
They work really, really hard for their incomes and the rewards really aren’t what you’d expect. This seems true outside of tech as well.
My wife works for the federal government on the other hand. She earns much less than I do, yet still dramatically higher than the average for our city and the rest of the country. She also has generous time off, training, an excellent union, interesting work, etc. Why in the world would she start a business? She actually could, too. She’s an awesome hydrographer with cutting-edge skills and knowledge. But she’d have to work herself to the bone if she went private and she’d have to work in wildly different and less comfortable contexts. And for what? 1.5x the income? 2x? After that’s chewed up by taxes, she has traded her family life for a career that barely pays more when you do the quantitative and qualitative maths.
Yet I think this is a huge problem. It isn’t really wise to work hard and innovate here, and I think it’s actually harming our workforce and economy quite seriously. Look to many countries and you can quickly point at many past and recent innovations and core competencies. But what do you see when you look at Canada? There’s certainly less, and seemingly less all the time. Our small population is a huge disadvantage here, but we have such immense opportunity for innovation.
I do think we innovate in extractive industries. We do a lot of environmental research around our primary industries, and that’s very valuable. Economically though, I don’t know… We aren’t much of a land of opportunity these days, and it doesn’t seem like much is happening to reverse this trend.
But damn, the lake has small island, coves, beaches.
Absolutely stunning and mostly devoid of intense tourism. ( aka : no stress to find a camping spot, you can also sleep in most places if you are respectful)
I wonder almost every day what ~70% of the city is doing to survive. We are very diligent about spending and while we’re comfortable, we still need to be careful. That’s insane. The situation is bad. Our local subreddit is loaded with people who are struggling, leaving, venting, etc. over money and work. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it.
Also weird: Victoria is the most expensive by many measures, yet remote work salary ranges never consider Victoria an expensive city. Vancouver, Toronto, they’re always on the list of course. But never Victoria. I had to turn down a role recently because it was around $40k per year lower than I’d earn in Vancouver, and I found their inflexibility and unreasonable stance on the matter incredibly concerning. I would pay almost exactly the same amount to live in Vancouver, but their calculator disagreed.
It ain't California or the PNW, but it also doesn't fit the stereotype of the Great White North, eh? As a person from a part of Canada with actual winters, calling this never-ending winter seems like a giant distortion. Most years we don't really have proper snow on the ground until after Christmas, and it's gone before April. Where I grew up in Alberta it's snow from late October until April.
This is
(a) just actually not literally true (41N at the border vs 43N),
(b) particularly off-base when you consider that "northern California" is typically a reference to the SF Bay Area
(c) completely deceptive.
Four months of the year with around two feet of snow, with an average low below freezing. San Francisco has barely ever gone below freezing in its entire historical record (literal record low of −3C a hundred years ago).
Yes yes, you don't have igloos in Toronto, fair point. But a person who drives on summer tires year round in Toronto is a homicidal maniac. In Vancouver that's merely lazy, an excuse to call in sick a few days a year.
No argument about Minnesota, though, nor about The Texas Of The North. And yes, it's hardly never-ending winters. The summers in T.O. are brutal too.
I would think there is some comparison between Canada and Texas as major trend-setters of their own unique culture, both philosophically and financially, within a diverse North American continent. For some things there are more similarities than differences. A lot of extractiveness with few owners but excess amounts of resources traditionally trickling down from there.
In Texas it's been declining for entrepreneurs starting 40 years ago. The most recent 20 years have been more of the same. There's still bright spots like anywhere else but overall the outlook for independents has only become more negative in the long run.
One of the obvious things nobody really looks at, Houston was founded (on an undeveloped floodplain) as a planned center of industry and commerce for Texas when it became a new nation after independence from Mexico. The idea was to replace San Antonio which had been the capital as a Spanish colony and Mexican state, and which had been inhabited by indigenous cultures since prehistoric times.
Growth-entrepreneurialism was ingrained and universal in Houston from day one, then put on steriods after the discovery of oil & gas.
After the arrival of the telephone most businesses depended on listing in the phone directory. Something I understand many young entrepreneurs have never seen nor utilized, so I digress.
By the 1970's (when everybody still had a land line telephone and the phone company was still a monopoly and quite uniform across the US) most cities had a directory format where the "white pages" at the beginning of the book were the fine-print alphabetic listing of all residential and business numbers, with businesses often appearing in bold in order to stand out among the residences, depending on their service agreement. Followed by the yellow pages which were a business listing with alphabetized categories (rather than alphabetized by business name), containing paid display advertisements, so you could look up consumer-oriented things like plumbers and auto mechanics, etc.
Unless you knew the correct name of the business, you were probably better off looking for a business number in the yellow pages, which would be maybe about the last half of a fairly massive softcover book.
In a place like Atlanta it was getting pretty crowded and they would then issue the white pages and the yellow pages as two separate massive volumes. Atlanta was a pretty hoppin' place.
But in Houston there were so many independent businesses that the phone company published a separate one of their huge soft-cover fine-print black & white directories each year just for individual business phone numbers. No display ads, just data, this was not the "yellow pages" which contained the sometimes whole-page paid advertisements, there were so many of those they were issued in two separate massive alphabetical volumes bound from the traditional yellow paper. This was the fine print and there wasn't room for the businesses within the residential directory anyway since that had already been divided into two separate alphabetical volumes of their own residential white-pages. They might have had a set up like this in other crowded places like Los Angeles.
Even after the Nixon recession had been suffered miserably by small businesses, the Houston business pages alone were about as big or bigger than the entire phone book of most other American cities, which I attribute to enhanced survival due to unprecedented high oil prices. But eventually after the Reagan recession kicked in, the business pages began to dwindle to a shadow of their former self.
We don't have the equivalent documents today to make a valid comparison with, since we're measuring thin pages by the kilo, but the gradual displacement of widespread opportunity with widespread malaise that was apparent in the macro environment has seemed to continue unabated for about 40 years now and it's about time people noticed.
Just another thing independent entrepreneurs have to face, they are an endangered species who has been under constant threat since before so many of them were born.
Any tradesperson can make that. People are charging $45/hr to clean air bnbs.
Doesn’t seem so hopeless to me.
1) My impression is that it's prettttty tough to get those 10% down mortgages these days. Though, again, that's behind me now, I could be wrong.
2) The bank will not consider your accom to be mortgage-minus-sublet-rent for the stress test, I promise you. They'll count your rent as additional income, at some discount (fuck you, bank), and then count 30% of that against your mortgage payment (for the stress test). I guess if you know someone who actually got this past the bank stress test then let us know, and let us know which bank, because I'll move the next time my mortgage comes up. But I have tried in the past. So you'd need a joint income of 200k (I trusted your estimate of mortgage at present rates on $810k), minus 10k/a for the rent, is $95k each, $46/h.
Still. Although it is definitely difficult, it is, as you say doable.
Also agree on the banks being difficult to work with on including the future rental income when qualifying.
It sucks if you are a single person - probably have to go apartment route or 1 bedroom condo. The most successful guy I know, who has a pretty sick motor yacht now, had a room mate until his now wife moved in.
Right, okay. And, to be clear, back in my day 5% down (FIVE) was totally plan A, so that has gotten harder for the next generation. Thanks, fedgov!
> difficult to work with
Heh, notwithstanding the amusing savagery of my sibling comment, is "difficult to work with" a euphemism for "impossible to work with", or do you have reason to believe that this is even possible?
> It sucks if you are a single person
I would say that it's getting closer to hopeless if you're a single-income family, and being a single-income individual isn't much better, because 1br condos are actually not that much cheaper than 1br.
I'm in a condo, btw, and I could have done it on my income alone when I bought (laxer stress tests, I provided the down solo anyway, rates were lower, prices were lower), but I could not buy this condo solo today, and certainly not with the income I had then.
I guess my overall message is: I think that the type of financial modelling you were doing is excellent to show that it is not yet impossible or hopeless, and if someone wants to make it happen, it's still within reach... but... it's genuinely really hard. For decades I've been scoffing at people whining about affordability, saying that they just spend too much on short-term pleasures, but in the last decade I've kinda stopped the scoffing and shut my mouth.
And you don't need a "clean income history", that's not a real thing. You need all the people on the mortgage to have a stable job, typically 6 months. If your source of income is more variable/complicated, they'll ask for 2 years of tax returns.
This kind of doomerism is why I wanted to support applied_heat's post in the first place.
But again, if space is literally all you're after, and you might be for all sorts of perfectly valid reasons, then that might be your choice. On the flipside, it would be weird for us to work relentless and double or more likely triple our monthly expenditure while basically getting only marginal or specious value for that money.
For example, even if the numbers or stability on our end made sense, and committing to that wild increase in cost didn't increase our exposure dramatically, we'd still be trading triple our shelter expenses for the added utility of basically one room and the power to knock out a wall or something.
No matter how you spin it, without a huge pool of cash and unrealistically high income(s), or a bunch of people subsidizing your mortgage, it's not impossible but generally not a sensible move unless you absolutely must own something for some reason.
I can theoretically earn above $100k, but it doesn't really matter unless that's sustained for a long time with few breaks, and that's not happening enough to bet on, such that I'd take out a mortgage expecting that income to be there long-term.
I'm not sure it's doomerism, as in, I wasn't saying things were "hopeless", just unrealistically demanding to attempt pursuit of what used to be considered a standard gradual path of upward growth. I live where I do despite that, and basically will until it's not feasible to do at all, along the way we'll have to face some seriously tricky choices anyway unless we can find someone else's basement to live in till at least our mid-thirties.
For the first property I agree you would need to qualify without taking the rental income in to account.
This part is a problem, because it sounds like 45 minutes to where the traffic starts, from there another 1.5 hrs to the parts of the city you want to go.
Or do you mean a net 45 min to city center?
However, I definitely should have been more narrow with my specification of West Coast. I like where I currently live, and have no plans to move, and have no plans to work myself into the dust in arbitrary jobs to afford a type of house that I don't want, somewhere I don't care to live, possibly dependant on a car I also don't want. If someone gave me the house you describe, I'd rent out the whole thing and continue renting where I am.
Ideally I'd shoot for a 1 or 2 bedroom condo in a more central area, but the math does not work out in a way that makes any sense to me, in part for the other reasons I cited in the original comment.
It's pretty common for people to come out of the woodwork when affordability or job concerns are raised to just imagine a series of variables whereby if you just keep dividing the space, adding jobs, and moving further out, there's no problem, because theoretically you can still pay for something regardless of how much or how far or how many other people you share it with.
I'd rather disagree with the premise, and spend my time and energy elsewhere instead of on some mcmansion in Langley for an amount of money it shouldn't be worth.
It's also rude to denigrate people who clean Airbnbs for $45/hr (which isn't enough) as if it's not a skill and anyone can just switch to it. It is a skill, and I don't have that skill, or the equipment, or any of the other stuff someone would require to get operating as a business which they'd need to be. Likewise tradespeople, which software developers clearly are in some ways.
The facts are that the Canadian software development market is terrible, job volatility is higher than it's been in quite a while, and housing of all kinds is higher than it's ever been all over the country. Those are not promising conditions for prosperity.
Either you rent for your whole life or you buy something and have to compromise on some of the variables. I see lots of people working hard, mostly in jobs they don’t love, and making those compromises and choosing to buy somewhere.
> despite literally not having a job, any prospects, or the possibility of owning a home at any point in my life, even as a software developer
I hope things turn around for you! I meant to point out that home ownership is possible, but it sounds like you have already evaluated the variables and if you are set on only living in some specific area then home ownership might not be possible in that location without a couple of well above average incomes.
where? as someone in the area, this does not match what I'm seeing
Is it adequate for you?
Squamish is a wonderful small town up the coast; a haven for climbers and outdoors people. Not many people have the intention of moving there—it's quite isolated—but even still, that attached townhouse has more than doubled in value since it's last sale in 2007, probably the majority of which came in the last 5 years.
Funny thing about high taxes being a disincentive.
And Canadian corporate taxes are very low. US and Canada basically the same on this front.
https://www.canadian-accountant.com/content/taxation/canada-...
"While the lowest five corporate tax rates worldwide are held by corporate tax havens (led by Ireland), the United States and Canada have ranked ninth and tenth respectively out of 33 major economies for the past two years. The corporate tax rate in Canada is lower than all the averages of regional jurisdictions, including the global and G7, according to the average tax rates of 33 UHY international firms, assuming companies have a profit of $1 million. "
Canada's problem is not excessive taxation. It's monopolies and lack of competition and over-reliance on commodity exports.
As for California, a lot of companies moved to Washington to escape the high taxes. Washington used to be a low tax state, but no longer, and companies aren't moving here anymore.
(Washington recently added a capital gains tax, payroll taxes, a $.50 per gallon additional gas tax, and boosted the sales tax to 10.1%.)
Actually I know working class Canadians are -- Canada's system is actually not very progressive compared to many US states, the bottom end of the tax bracket is fairly heavily weighted... but corporations here are sitting pretty. Best gig in Canada (after real estate) is to be a fake "contractor" paying corporate taxes instead of personal income taxes, and stashing your wealth in corporate assets and paying your spouse dividends... it's ridiculous.
In any case, to throw it back: Something is paying for the US's massive defense sector. What do you think it is?
Taxes and deficits. Both of which are extracted from the economy.
The thing is, we need people to pay taxes because our public systems are having major issues and people earning or paying less is a real problem for all of us. Would I like to get more from what I earn? Yeah, in a sense. Do I need it? Not as much as the average Canadian. Not even close.
For 10 years I worked at Google and pulled in what I would consider a ridiculous salary. But over 50% of it was pulled away in taxes. I am a socialist by conviction so don't complain about these kinds of taxes much, but it really chafed me to see people in contracting situations bringing in more than me by squirreling away money, hiding it from the gov't in these kinds of corporate arrangements.
Canada is a bit below 39M people. In 2003 it was above 31M. The growth is decidedly less than 10M.
But yes, support for entrepreneurs is nonexistent, my little company (not even reaching 1M CAD a year in revenue) is controlled by the same rules on paper as SNC-Lavalin (except of course if they break the rules the prime minister fires the minister of justice to avoid prosecution but if I am late with a report a few days I get fined). Many European countries have simple flat taxes with minimal administration.
Thankfully we now have a ministry of finance serious about inflation and moving rates high, and provincial and federal governments cracking down on Airbnb.
No minister has anything to do with interest rates. Only the Bank of Canada does, and it takes no input or guidance from the government.
I am disappointed by this aspect of the OO, but that does not imply the BoC is more sensitive.
Or we move to America and earn twice as much money.
Canada has an ace in the hole here (that America doesn’t) in the form of a relatively generous immigration program.
It’s time it leans on immigrants to bolster its entrepreneurship. Immigrants are by definition self-selected risk takers it’s a match made in heaven. However to fix it Canada needs:
a) less regulations on work requirements for immigrants (it’s less complicated than America but that’s not saying much)
b) better funding environment (I’m not a funder/investor so not qualified to speak to this, but I know it sucks)
c) housing, housing and lots of cheap housing especially, in the big cities and college towns where most budding entrepreneurs build the networks required to succeed.
Without c) esp Canada is DOA. But that’s a whole other post.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
You are going to find very few if any brand name VCs participating in their dog and pony show.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
The real needle driver is the much maligned student visa program. While stuffing students into rando colleges in the far flung regions of the country (“diploma mills”) isn’t great, the mainstay colleges/universities should be encouraged to double/triple their intake.
There is an existing workflow that turns students into well-networked, educated individuals empowered to manouever the levers of power/capital. Just lean on that more.
Maybe some grifters. Case in point, Jason Calacanis: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAllinPodcasts/comments/17bkk8a/j...
To me, it seems to me that immigration is mostly motivated by politicians desperate to cover up the cost of their unwise deficit spending and liabilities by diffusing the cost across more people, as well as enriching the landed gentry with more rents. They couldn’t give two craps about helping recent immigrants start successful businesses, they want them to benefit their interests immediately, not incubate some far off benefit twenty years in the future.
But everytime it’s complaints about too much demand, but never a complain about supply. Even though they are both similar political problems. I don’t want to speculate why.
Immigrants have more than proven themselves to be good entrepreneurs once the shackles I mentioned above have been removed.
Whereas a five year old could understand, if we literally just stopped all immigration tomorrow (this would have extremely bad consequences like causing an immediate recession and huge unemployment but hypothetically) housing prices would crater because Canadians don’t reproduce at anything close to replacement. But people go oh no no, the REAL solution to the problem is the thing causing the problem.
Immigration I accept is a lesser evil to the alternative, but it’s certainly not the solution to the housing crisis. It’s just not.
If we have a labor problem let’s import construction workers, fix zoning, build a large housing fund and construction department and mobilize it. Actually work the problem on a provincial and municipal level.
As opposed to constantly kvetching about supply and trying to murder it (see: foreign buyers bans, airbnb bans and now the ever popular immigration stoppages). It’s all whack-a-mole band aids that are clearly not working.
Solve the actual problem, and that’s supply, supply and supply.
Sure we have enough housing to support our slowing aging/dying native-born population if we shut off immigration. That’s not actually an improvement at all.
We agree that cost of living + housing costs are cratering entrepreneurship, and that the simple effect of supply (slow home building, restrictive zoning) and demand (more people/immigration) is at play.
However, I think it’s not an option to slow down on either immigration or keep the current slow trickle of residence building as-is. We need BOTH faster, because we let this problem fester.
>It’s time it leans on immigrants to bolster its entrepreneurship. Immigrants are by definition self-selected risk takers it’s a match made in heaven.
Yes, Confederation and Conestoga are just jam-packed with immigrant entrepreneurs. Why aren't they creating thousands of startups?
(Context for non-Canadians: Like the US, Canada allows international students to work. Unlike the US, Canada allows those students to work off campus. This has caused the rise of an entire industry, in which so-called institutions of higher learning (Conestoga, Lambton, Confederation) have 99% Indian "students" that work off campus, destroying the local job and housing markets.)
This has been debunked again and again[1]. Please stop. No ones complaining about unemployment/underemployment anymore and with good reason. Even the article OP posted cites a job market that is too good for entrepreneurs to take risks outside of it. Let’s just set this one aside.
The housing market and other inflation is mostly an artificial own goal on the governments part. Demand is a good thing in markets that aren’t artificially constrained.
[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-immigration-doesnt-reduce-...
The blog post you've linked is titled "Why immigration doesn't reduce wages", which I think is an absurd claim to make. The author seems more interested in owning "anti-immigration people" than actually proving that thesis. Citing a handful of studies does not conclusively prove that immigration is never and can never have negative effects.
The article also does not seem relevant to Canada whatsoever. You don't think that the massive lines for a handful of minimum wage job postings are in any way impacting local job markets? Does Tim Hortons abusing the TFW program help or harm the local job market?
The Canadian economy is a ponzi-scheme dependant on bringing in an accelerating number of immigrants every year and saddling them with debt.
Essentially it is the class that owns houses which restrict new supply under the guise of environmentalism or whatever they can find to enforce NIMBYism. The rents extracted from new immigrants are crazy high.
While true, I think it's important not to conflate "land" with "land people actually want to live in". Most land is cold and inhospitable. Perhaps people would have gladly moved to North Ontario in exchange for a parcel of land in the past, but nowadays everyone wants to be in Vancouver or the GTA.
Anecdotally, I know of several people that started working full time (30+ hours) doing things like driving trucks within their first year.
[0] https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/international-student-in-toronto-...
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3970935/lethbridge-burger-king-sl...
I asked if immigration could address this, and they each pointed out that a. Immigrants can’t afford to work in this industry in places where we need housing the most, b. While building requires unskilled labour, it also requires highly skilled labour that is at an unprecedented shortage which isn’t easily or rapidly corrected with immigration, c. Cities and neighborhoods are deeply attached to their reasons for resisting various densification projects, and breaking through arbitrary red tape here is an immense and intractably expensive undertaking.
They painted a very bleak picture of the housing situation, making it seem as though huge changes need to occur in order for meaningful progress to be made.
This might be less of an issue in other cities. I’m not sure.
The large-scale tolerance of this is basically permanently resigning Canada to degrowth. So no, lets not accept this. It is what most cities are facing and the provincial governments need to put an end to it.
What we need is massive training/re-training + labor importation program for the construction industry (and probably also healthcare, but I digress), and WW2 level mobilization in construction, anything short of that and I'm betting the economic and entrepreneurial problems get entrenched for a century.
#1 - took in a bigger slice of taxes
#2 - redistributed them to municipalities
#3 - made this redistribution contingent on densification.
What we have now is some tragedy of the commons crap where everybody wants to address the housing prices, but if you call to densify any neighbourhood the local busybodies will cry bloody murder. Yet everybody wants the government to do something about housing, just not in their backyard. The only way for densification to be fair, and not result in one municipality seeing a sharper decline in housing prices than another, is for EVERYBODY to be compelled to change and have each municipality work out the finer details.
Alas, I am deeply pessimistic about change, in no small part because elected politicians are far more likely to be landlords than the general population putting them in a huge conflict of interest.
I hesitate to say that in a sense because frankly, I don’t fully understand it. I do however understand that we’re languishing in many ways, and we don’t appear prepared to address this in a meaningful way.
It feels a bit like watching someone play a real time strategy game and noticing things are easy for them because external elements are removing difficulty from the game, so they focus their resources on a lot of the wrong stuff. Then when hard times come, they’re brutally unprepared and get wrecked while they try to ramp up to deal with whatever came for them. It feels like Canada is at the stage where the first taste of bad stuff has arrived, and we’re still fumbling with deciding what/if/how to address this bad thing. And we’d really like to continue playing the game as we were up until that point.
Maybe a terrible analogy. I’m the epitome of a layperson. All of this is opinion that should be taken with teaspoons of salt.
For example: we're ignoring the fact that our economy is heavily skewed towards "fake productive" activities like selling the same house back-and-forth to each other, and the Finance industry (an accountant friend tells me that even in Oil & Gas a lot of the "growth" happens through trading unproductive land stakes). The other heavyweight driver of activity is Government, but that can't be sustained if you're not generating value through other industries...
I also think that Canadians have a complacent attitude to daily corruption ("it couldn't happen here - that only happens in those funny tropical countries!"). This means that corruption flourishes just under the surface in many places.
I think that Avetis Muradyan gives an accurate rundown of this "coasting" mentality in Canada: https://www.palladiummag.com/2019/09/19/how-not-to-build-a-c...
I can only imagine the situation is worse in Canada since the immigration system favors people with tertiary degrees.
We need to figure out how to incentivize people to choose skilled manual labor as a career. As it is the rewards don't compare with a career spent in an office even if the pay in the office is lower. That's because the office work is more pleasant and the career likely longer due to less wear and tear on the body.
Public safety employees (police and firefighters) have early retirements because their jobs are physically demanding. If we don't figure out a way to guarantee early retirements for people with physically demanding jobs in the private sector, young workers with options will continue to avoid them. And the houses that everyone knows we need most of all won't get built.
I don't know what a better option would look like, but it is a deal breaker that some people I know personally had to wrestle with.
You just did with the rest of your comment.
>As it is the rewards don't compare with a career spent in an office even if the pay in the office is lower. That's because the office work is more pleasant and the career likely longer due to less wear and tear on the body.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
2019 saw 1000 skilled tradespeople get invites.
2020 had 251 come in.
2021 saw zero people under the federal skilled trades worker program.
2022 also had zero people come in under the federal skilled workers program.
I don't know why we're not seeing skilled trades people getting invited to come into Canada.
UP! Why does everyone forget UP?! I’ve followed some of the projects proposed for development in Victoria (I am in the industry and lived on Salt Spring Island for a while), and the city has been as backward as any other city in the nation by making developers jump through hoops to get even a tiny modicum of density. The NIMBY population in Victoria is also among the most aggressive in the country.
Uncontrolled immigration without assimilation can have disastrous consequences. And assimilation is a polite way of saying "give up your culture and adopt ours."
Unfortunately, without assimilation, all the politics and problems of the homeland will follow the diaspora to the new host country. It has been seen time and time again:
- Italian and Irish emigration to the US
- Migration from the Indian subcontinent as well as Muslim countries of Africa and the Middle East into Europe and North America
If you cannot solve this but still want immigrants, the numbers have to be reduced massively and some kind of pause between waves will be required so that gradual assimilation can be achieved.
It couldn't be more generous than the US, which accepts millions just walking over the border.
Real-estate securitization has DoS’d key class 5 to 7 zones. This means empty industrial buildings stay empty, as the tax-deductions on inflated-valuations are also used to underwrite more debt... worth more than any lease sucker deal. Try to convince a competent CEO a small $32k/month triple-net lease isn’t going to bleed an inexperienced company into receivership eventually.
Pick just about any US state, hire 30 locals, and making a profit gets so much easier. The US financial ecosystem is generally far more harmonious even to type C corporations.
As an outsider in unregulated markets, one could see Corporate sponsored prostitution, targeted bribery, and blackmail. You just aren't important enough if you don't know these facts yet.
Canada has some of the silliest smart people in the world =)
I wonder if they're self aware about how dumb their suggestions sound. If all it took was some sort skills, then everyone would be starting businesses left and right.
Or because they're paid to say something. And that needs to be easily and individually actionable.
Perhaps what has actually changed in the last 20 years is that, thanks to technical advancement, a need for employees has declined – not that fewer people are taking on business operational risk as entrepreneur is more typically defined?
For example, I operate three different businesses in Canada, but only one of them hires employees.
No, many entrepreneurs borrow money to start businesses. Traditionally that was a function of banks, lending to small businesses. Maybe not in Canada.
[1] Probably wrong as Canada is considered, according to the OECD, the most educated nation in the world.
“new businesses are responsible for 'almost all net new job creation in this country’”
Is simply bullshit, the public sector is driving a huge slice of job creation in Canada and has for the last 20 years. Now you can argue that’s a bad thing but it is a thing and this “chief economist” is simply wrong on basic facts.
I don't doubt this. But do you have a source?
Sept 2023 - Public sector employees: 4,291.7; Private sector employees: 13,293.4; Self-employed: 2,685.1
Sept 2003 - Public sector employees: 2,945.8; Private sector employees: 10,298.9; Self-employed: 2,430.0
Difference - Public sector employees: 1,345.9; Private sector employees: 2994.5; Self-employed: 255.1
% growth - Public sector employees: 45.7%; Private sector employees: 29.1%; Self-employed: 10.5%
If you're willing to lower your standards for what constitutes a "job" sufficiently the public sector can be a job creation machine.
Most of the committee was happy to dole out funding for arts projects.
I was the only one that advocated for funding an entrepreneur program, and reasoning that funding future entrepreneurs will create the funding for art’s grant was lost on the progressives.
Government policy, both the conservatives and the liberals, are very cosy to large corporations. Most of their announcements, that supposedly help small businesses are simply far out of reach due to requirements for revenue or number of employees, and is essentially corporate welfare. The BDC and EDC are a joke, both crown corporations run by people very disconnected from any sort of reality.
Of course it was driven by interest rates, but the insidious thing about interest rate is it allows zombie corporations. These organizations that should’ve gone out of business being acquired or shut down, but because of their size and revenue were able to continue to borrow more and more and more money at extremely low interest rates. of course it’s coming to an end now as financial reality hits. Many of these companies are forced to cut, but they were actually hopelessly dysfunctional so over time though finally either just be bought or go to business.
all of this to say, the last 20 years has been a terrible time to start a business in Canada but a lot of markers are indicating things could be getting better soon. While it may be good for somebody starting a business isn’t good for necessarily the average person.
anyway, the thing I find absolutely laughable is that we need more education for entrepreneurs. The funniest thing I’ve read all year. there is no education that will make someone an entrepreneur, but someone may learn enough to be scarred out of taking the plunge.
finally, the idea that there’s a single definition of Canadians is completely stupid and misinformed. culture varies dramatically from coast to coast and from the south to the north. if someone thinks that nobody wants to work, or nobody wants to make money, it speaks about the people that they associate with not the country they live in. I think that is true most anywhere.
While I agree that there's no single definition of Canadian, I do think there's a particular Canadian sickness that seems to think that policy that benefits and protects existing established interests is good policy.
Example: local rural zoning laws here in Hamilton area were being revisited some years ago. I live on a small farm so went to the sessions and read the documents, etc. And I have an interest in the wine industry, so noticed that in the bylaws they went out of their way to explicitly forbid winery development in any area but an area east of the city (towards Niagara.) Why? When I asked the zoning officer at a public meeting, she just stared at me blankly: "Because that's where the wineries already are."
She wasn't corrupt. She wasn't stupid. She didn't care about the issue. But the thought that you might want to craft regulation in such a way to leave things open for new entrants and possibilities was ... confusing to her. But why would you close off a whole agricultural area to new developments like that? I don't get the mindset, but I see it all the time. Maybe because we're so used to being squashed by the US that we feel we have to protect the successes that we have? Bizarrely though we have very intense internal protectionism.
I see examples of this all over the place. From Alberta's recent moves against the burgeoning renewable energy sector, to Ontario wine regulations, to the way the telecomms sector is run nationally, to the way grants and incubators etc are set up.
More likely ever-increasing taxes, mandates, lawsuits and crushing regulations.
I'd mention something, but I see you've already invited a giant white elephant, which has its trunk wound around the handle of an "affordable housing" sign.
So many productive urban spaces are left as prarking lots & rundown buildings in so many Canadian urban cores as a product of rampant real estate speculation (more accurately, land speculation).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-a...
How do people define it?
Are young "sneakerheads" who collect and trade shoes "entrenprenuers"
1. the rents are too damned high.
2. Bureaucracy has barriers for everyone except monopolies, and prefers monopolies as it's less groups to negotiate with. (A significant amount of said bureaucracy is private industry, but yes, most public qualifies too).
3. Internet access is controlled by a small group of monopolies who manage to (largely) keep access costs above anywhere else in the world, largely - and definitely higher than most of the USA.
4. Shipping is largely controlled by either US monopolies that aren't reliable, safe or consistent, or Canada Post who's been eroded repeatedly by Canadian Conservatives favouring their US friends.
5. US protectionism results in some businesses - especially supplies - either being shut down or bought up and moved US-side or the like. This one goes back a long ways, but Conservatives provincially and federally have escalated it every chance they have.
In short - if your business idea requires a storefront, you're likely paying 2-10x housing rent (or more), and your home will be 2-10x what it was renting for 1-3 years ago. Business rents go up arbitrarily without any ability to negotiate (as the people renting out control it). Household rent goes up arbitrarily, largely due to same. While I've not seen direct proof, there are signs most real estate is either owned by foreign (eg USA based or other) for (artificially inflated) investment, tax evaders or money launderers. Canadian real estate isn't worth the price attached almost anywhere - especially when one qualifies that outside of some specific areas, it's colder than most other places in the world.
At the end of the day it's still possible, but if I could find a path to get a simple product to market without being swamped by amazon (and its cartels of forgers and thieves - most third party) or similar across other markets ... I would have long ago.
There's one more cost of entry - NIMBYism and city zoning. This is a subtle one - it means one has a lot of barriers against opening a business out of a home unless strictly mail order. This was established a long time ago...
These three regions in usa are doing almost all the innovation in the western world currently.
Why? Because it’s where ambitious, hungry people go to make their mark in their world.
Success breeds success and usa treats their successful better than any other western country.
That's what's different between USA and Canada.
Get your self educated and respect the greats.
Have the natural resources run out or something? I mean, I get that some will eventually, but Canada's pumping and digging more out of the ground than ever.
Crude production has doubled in 20 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265182/oil-production-in...
A lot of the "entrepreneurs" are mostly solo professionals/trades rather than tech startups. Increasingly, more now go into a firm environment instead. The firm might create more societal wealth than entrepreneurs for professionals/trades.
A plumber joining a firm should get more plumbing done when appointments, invoicing, marketing, etc. are handled by specialists. And if 20 plumbers co-owner-operate the firm, are they all entrepreneurs or private sector employees?