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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

If Canada is smart they'll figure out a way to incentivize businesses and workers from knowledge economies like the coastal blue states to move there. I'd love to live and work in Canada but I'm not taking a massive pay cut to do it.

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I refused moving from Canada to the US multiple times because the extra pay wasn't worth the downsides. There is value in things that are hard to translate into simple numbers like money. And that's as an immigrant to Canada.

Curious, since I know little about Canada. What were the downsides for you?

Living in Canada gives access to universal healthcare that won't bankrupt you if you need medical help, whereas in the US getting sick can financially collapse everything you've worked for - all so some CEO can have their yacht. Chances are also significantly higher in the US that you will be shot dead in a grocery store or movie theater.

Maybe it's because I've lived in Canada for 4+ decades now, but I wouldn't exactly call what we have access to universal healthcare. It's hard to find a family doctor, if you do find a family doctor, whether you can get reasonable appointment access, is highly dependent on the doctor and not always available. If you do get an appointment and you need to see a specialist or other service that needs a referral you often face a substantial wait list. It's nothing like what it was in the 80's and 90's where appointments were always easily same day or next day and wait lists were short or non existent. To me this is just broken in the opposite way that america's system is broken.

Also, the gun thing makes me think people don't understand statistics. The number of gun related deaths in the usa was 14.6 per 100k people in 2021 and around 0.5 per 100k in Canada, so yes it's drastically higher in the usa but that ignores that 60% of those are suicides and it ignores the highly geographically concentrated nature of the problem.You avoid a handful of neighborhoods and think happy thoughts and your gun death risk basically disappears. unadjusted its a ~1% risk over an 80 year lifetime in the USA vs 0.04% in canada. When you take into account reality and realize you aren't suicidal and you aren't going to visit or live in that tiny handful of extremely high risk neighborhoods the USA risk also drops to almost zero, even over a lifetime.

Canada is a country that takes better care the people living there, and that changes how people behave. Public health care, less inequality, no school shootings... overall a more caring culture where I am happy for my children to grow up.

I lived for a few years in the UK and it reminds me a bit of that.

> I'd love to live and work in Canada but I'm not taking a massive pay cut to do it.

Then you have your answer. Canada is not "US with free healthcare". It has a different history, economic and political setup. A quarter of the population are Francophone, and they govern very differently from the rest of Canada. Canada's wealth is also concentrated in the mining and natural resources industries, not in knowledge economy services. You cannot tweak policy here and there and turn it into a nation of SaaS billionnaires any more than you could in the UK or France.

For a real-world juxtaposition of the differences, think of Blackberry. In 2007, they saw the iPhone and told their partners at AT&T that the bandwidth load a portable Youtube/Internet device would put on AT&T's towers would cause call interruptions. Lo and behold, they did: AT&T was synonymous with dropped calls from 2007-2010 [0], when they finally spent billions into upgrading their towers to 4G. Blackberry ultimately lost the handset market, but for many other reasons besides their oft-mocked reaction to the iPhone.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/08/cnet.iphone.att.dropped....

> You cannot tweak policy here and there and turn it into a nation of SaaS billionnaires any more than you could in the UK or France.

Why would any country *want* to do that?

I suspect they'll have to fry the housing crisis fish first, it doesn't matter how favorable your business environment is if nearly no one can afford to move and live there.

To paraphrase a quote ;)

This country is the second largest in the world and filled mainly of forests. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of land and construction materials at the same time.

This is not what the crisis is about. The housing crisis is not a lack of space to build nor a lack of materials. It's a lack of housing that's both desirable and affordable. Most people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere with nothing around, even if it costs very little. Look at Italy for example, they're giving houses in rural areas away for free, granted you agree to permanently live there, and they still don't have much in the way of takers.

You are right, of course.

To add more context, the point of the original quote* (and the paraphrase) is to draw attention to an ironic situation and perhaps offer some hope that the situation is fundamentally solvable.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Wales/Selected_quote/12

Housing is absolutely insane up here. At least Carney seems to want to tackle the supply side[1] instead of adding more tax breaks and savings schemes for buyers.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-double-pace-home-bui...

You should read his plan again. It's not for you, it's for business and/or government owning rental property that you will then pay to rent. It's going to enrich large companies like Brookfield, not help the average person own a home. The part about manufactured homes is also dumb. Unless he's invented better manufacturing technology, those are more expensive to build than stick frame.

> workers from knowledge economies like the coastal blue states to move there

In the 1980's a British researcher living in the U.S. became angry with the election of Ronald Reagan and his desire of using A.I. research for military purposes. He then moved to Toronto.[1] Last year that scientist, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, received the Nobel Prize for his research in A.I. that helped turn Toronto into a world hub in technology.

In the early 2000's it was the turn of an American scientist, angry with the policies of George W. Bush, moving to Edmonton, Alberta. This year that scientist Dr. Richard S. Sutton won the Turing prize for his research on Reinforcement Learning.

I have hopes that Donald Trump might become the best president that Canada never had.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/world/canada/the-man-who-...

Canada has good universities, but not many notable tech companies. The last big one was RIM and they collapsed under the iPhone. Shopify seems to be doing OK though.

I'd suggest they collapsed under themselves.

RIM was already dying technically. They had a few corporate-friendly features (push notifications, some good security features) but even by the standards of the 2000s their software was lousy and the hardware unremarkable. It looked like the same problem as Nokia at the time, and Google a decade later, where the management were so busy milking the cash cow that they neglected long-term R&D and responding to market trends. I think even without the iPhone to copy from, Android would have killed them because the tech stack was a generation newer and far more capable.

That's not going to happen because the labor markets are fundamentally different. USA has a drastically stronger capital market that invests dramatically more in startups. While this is true, the wages will always be dramatically higher and the growth in jobs will always be dramatically more in the usa. After those companies grow decently, Canada will be the first or second stop for those USA startups looking to save some dough on wages hiring cheaper labor and as a place that will be much easier to migrate even cheaper third world labor to for a similar, cheaper purpose as hiring Canadian. Americans moving to Canada for Programming jobs will be ideological, not sound financial decision based.

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