Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

bnnbloomberg.ca

59 pointsleopoldj74 comments

>ROGER: Okay, how does this compare to the ’90s when we saw a brain drain then? Is it larger? Different sectors?

>FRANCIS: No, I think, Roger, you pointed to it correctly. This is not an issue that is brand new for Canada.

oh, okay then. so, the same thing is happening as has always happened. the only interesting thing about this article is trying to determine if it's motivated by the opposition party trying to score some points (like it usually is) or by the US trying to share a positive in response to all the "canadian tourism numbers are down" stories going around lately.

It looks like the major difference recently is that TN visa issuance has surged in recent years, up to over 1.2 million in 2023. The previous all time high was back in 2016 (~800,000).

More highly educated Canadian and Mexican professionals are relocating to the US than ever before, which is obviously concerning for Canada.

Literally the next sentences:

> It’s one that we’ve been facing for quite some time. The reason we wrote this report, however, is to highlight the fact that we’re sort of in this moment in time right now, with our relationship with the U.S. deteriorating and us trying to diversify our trading partners, to highlight the fact that we are still not really all that competitive. Our productivity growth is quite low and has been for a few years now. So, banging this drum about wanting to raise this issue around competitiveness, that was the goal of this.

With the U.S. moving from a cooperative trade partner to a trade competitor, Canada needs to up its game.

The monumental obstructions to getting anything done in Canada, from bloated beurocracys that are in the business of denying the service they were created to provide is a huge obsticle to starting a business here in Canada, hence the fever dream of joining the EU and exploiting millions of imigrants to do the actual physical stuff for cheap and obiediently, lest they run afoul of the many rules ,regulations and conditions on which there forever pending citizenship depends, which favors existing LARGE businesses to scale up,leaving high talented people with little real oportunity. So ya, a lot of people set out to get a grub stake or just give in and take the highest bid.

> With the U.S. moving from a cooperative trade partner to a trade competitor, Canada needs to up its game.

Even if the US was still benevolent (ish), Canada needed to up its game. I have heard Canada be described as "European wages with American working hours".

It's a great country with good people and lots of beauty, but they need an economy and job prospect beyond real estate, mining, banking, automotive, and government funded. The country seems to lack diversity in prospects and relatively uncompetitive wages.

For those leaving after completely undergraduate schooling that is taxpayer subsidized, there should be both carrots/sticks to discourage it - carrots would be to substantially juice tuition tax credits to give young people a better shot to save coming out of school. Sticks would be that if you are leaving soon after graduating, you are maybe on the hook for paying back some of that subsidized education. I'm not married to the exact carrots and sticks, but the country probably needs to do something short term while they also sort out future economic growth sectors.

Post secondary should be setup as a loan for the subsidized portion withloan forgiveness prorated over a decade. If you leave the tax net it converts to payments like any other loan. Everywhere should be doing this, its just good policy. The carrot is way more of a problem because this place needs to be less junk on nearly every measureable dimension. the examples are too numerous to list but housing needs to be a lot more affordable and there is probably a hundred things to fix to make that one thing function betteras one example.

Not that realistic, my salaries have always been about double of what's offered in Europe (or more). Also "Europe" is vague, average salary in Italy is low enough to be a joke

Cost of life though, is completely fucked up.

The not-so-top secret way to get rich as a Canadian new grad in tech is to get a job at a unicorn by way of TN status, hop around for ~5-10 years, possibly getting an H-1B, but never pursuing a greencard.

Accumulate wealth by any means necessary. If you find yourself with nice RSUs or options, hang on to them or exercise them, respectively.

When you're fed up move back to Canada and enjoy no exit tax and enjoy the step-up cost basis on all your assets. Sell all your RSUs and pay nearly zero capital gains. Use your imagination here.

(If you are unlucky and only have losses, well, you'll never really be able to use them tax-wise.)

How do they get the cost-basis reset?

Canada counts it from the moment you entered it as domicile

So you just change your address in your broker? Or do you need to transfer the stock to a Canadian broker?

Is this new? I thought this had been the case for decades.

Not new at all. Articles have been spouting this for a long time.

Anecdotally, a lot of us return to Canada after a short stint in the US.

Speaking as a Waterloo grad that moved to the US for about 5 years post graduation. Many of my university classmates did something similar.

As a current Waterloo student (who is not particularly tied to any specific place). I’m curious about this and I’d like to know more. Why US for 5 years and why back?

It's a myth that US income tax is always lower than in Canada.

I worked in the US for a bit when I started out. I paid more income tax in CT than in Toronto on the same salary.

I just wanted to come back home. Even in small town CT, there were areas we were told to stay away from after dark.

Can’t speak for the OP but it’s often about what’s most valuable at different points in life. Depending on where you are in the US, having kids can be a formidable experience. Poor leave, expensive childcare, etc etc. It can change the calculation for whether the extra money in the US is actually worth it.

That’s fair. I can see a lot of reasons to stay in Canada over the US for long term plans.

Although it feels like all of the desirable jobs (in terms of technical interestingness and pay) are in the US. At least for internships.

And to simplify, there’s also really only two reasons to move:

1) more interesting work opportunities; and

2) more money

And the delta on (1) has never been smaller thanks to remote work post-covid (even after all the RTO).

So basically, at some point, you start asking if the extra money is worth it.

(Depending where you come from in Canada, lifestyle in SF might be better overall - but then you can just move back to somewhere else in Canada and have it all.)

Right out of school it was fun and easy to drop everything and go somewhere cool (SF, NY, etc.). Can tell everyone you work for a flashy big tech company, make a ton of money, and have no responsibilities.

But eventually life catches up to you, especially if you have strong family/social roots in Canada. It's not easy to bootstrap that in a new country.

I was also there under a TN Visa and had a few border experiences that rubbed me the wrong way since the TN Visa is a bit hand wavy and up to the border guard at your time of entry. The hostility at times from the border guards didn't make it feel like I was returning "home". Sure, I worked for a company that had an army of lawyers to fix it if anything went wrong but it still leaves you with a sour taste. I can't imagine they're getting any friendlier these days.

Lastly, I didn't mean it like 5 is some magic number - some stay less, some stay more.

Over 150 years:

> Colonial administrators in Canada observed the trend of human capital flight to the United States as early as the 1860s, when it was already clear that a majority of immigrants arriving at Quebec City were en route to destinations in the United States. Alexander C. Buchanan, government agent at Quebec, argued that prospective emigrants should be offered free land to remain in Canada. The issue of attracting and keeping the right immigrants has sometimes been central to Canada's immigration history.[245]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight#Canada

My father's family emigrated from the US to Canada to claim free land in the 1800s. They stayed about a century then returned to the US.

One time offers will often only get temporary results.

It's the pay, it's always the pay. If our salaries were closer to the U.S. this wouldn't be happening.

It’s more than that, right? Canadian real estate is bonkers for example, and would still be even if we magically elevated Canadian salaries to US levels.

The SF Bay Area has consistently been more bonkers, relatively and absolutely, so I don't think is a substantial contributing factor.

US real estate in many desirable metro areas is bonkers too. And yet, Canadian engineers want to move to the SF Bay Area...

I think ratios are worse in Canada pay/housing. SF/Bay are also nice because you can make a lot, rent, and then move away to low cost housing. The opposite doesn't work - you can't make a bunch of money in Canada and go elsewhere to cheaper housing, at least not easily. West coast wages are probably objectively bloated, but that bloat is the primary reason global talent flows there with the plan to not necessarily stay there forever.

Obviously, a throwaway. Microsoft calls their Vancouver office "The Refugee Center"

I swear I read an article not long ago declaring the US was losing top talent to other locales.

I suppose data could be used to justify whatever position and thus earn daily bread for the headline. Tomorrow there’ll need to be another story.

I'm sorry but is this an article from the late 1990s?

I'm also from Canada and I know tons of Canadians that have come here since the 90s. I even known immigrants to Canada from other countries (mainly China and India) that came to the US via Canada, using the TN1 or H1B visas after getting their Canadian citizenships.

The biggest problem Canada has is that any moderately successful tech worker is going to be dead-set on trying to get into the US because the Canadian tech scene can't compare based on base pay, annual bonus, starting equity or refreshers, etc. I make more money than all my friends combined. One of my friends is a teacher in Toronto and my annual bonus is more than his entire yearly salary.

I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers. There's literally trillions of dollars in tech ideas that could have been created in Canada but all of the founders left for the US.

> I make more money than all my friends combined

Get richer friends! Problem solved!

> I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers

I'm not sure that Canadian taxes compare that unfavourably to combined California plus federal taxation. A deeper, more structural limitation appears to be the venture capital environment, namely that Canada doesn't have a good one.

Canada's investable capital is dominated by pension funds, insurance companies (i.e. pension funds), and banks (i.e. pensioners). All are risk averse (https://thelogic.co/news/bdc-canadian-venture-capital-report...), which makes it hard for Canadian startups to begin scaling. Without native "unicorns" (https://financialpost.com/technology/why-canada-best-startup...), there's allegedly a failure-to-launch for the entire sector – tech billionaires being some of the most reliable early-stage investors with the greatest risk tolerance.

The porous border works both for and against the sector. On one hand that makes it relatively easy (but not automatic) for a Canadian tech company to enter the US market, but on the other hand it's also relatively easy for Canadian tech workers (founders included) to simply relocate (note the article here). If startups leave for the US's vast fields of venture capital, they're less likely to come back. Note that around the turn of the year Y-Combinator halted investments in Canadian firms (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/adding-canada-back) because they so frequently relocated to the US.

This venture capital cycle seems to be a deeply-entrenched and very hard problem. If democratically feasible tax incentives could reliably create "the Silicon Valley of X," then we probably would have many more Silicon Valleys both in the US and elsewhere.

You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?

It's concentration of nodes in the graph that makes SV unlike any other place on earth.

Other places that want to be SV need to solve the cold-start problem to build up their local node set, not emulate what SV is like today.

It’s actually policy that incentives risk taking where 1 in 50 bets will succeed

> You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?

I believe that my comment above was aligned with your premise here. I say that the tax difference is not sufficient by itself and that Canada reportedly has a very non-SV-like venture capital ecosystem.

Something feels deeply wrong about comparing your tech income to a teacher’s. Especially outside the context of an argument like “teachers should be paid more.”

"teachers should be paid more" isn't an argument, it's a statement. But perhaps I've made your point for you.

I don't understand your injection of your own morality into my statement, it is completely orthogonal to my point.

I did not mean to make a moral judgement. I was too flippant. It is a weird comparison. You compare a salary in an industry where people are known to be paid well to one where people are known to be paid poorly. Of course you make more money regardless of USA or Canada.

My point was that someone I've known for my entire life, I earn more than them through my bonus than they make working an entire year. This is a personal connection. The amount of money I make in Silicon Valley is enormous compared to people I know very well. It should be the same way in Canada and maybe having a solid layer of well-off tech workers will raise everyone's salaries. Experienced teachers in private schools in Silicon Valley make well over $100k, unlike my friend in Toronto so there is something to be said about the trickle down effect (even though I mostly don't believe it).

They can't be that smart if they're heading into the US now. Concerns about ICE hunting down "furiners" should be enough to give them pause; Especially those that are part of a visible minority.

I'm a visible minority who went from the GTA to Boston, everything is fine. People with this attitude are mostly fear mongering. No one I know has been harassed by ICE. Not saying they aren't doing terrible stuff, but the average tech worker is just fine in the US.

ELI5 - Canadians can just cross the border and get a job in the USA? No need for work visa? Is that by virtue of being Canadian citizens? What are the legals?

TN visa

The US makes it relatively easy to get a work visa if you have a science degree from a university.

Science degree from a US university you mean? I'm not trolling, genuine question.

Canadian university degree is fine. Look up TN 1 visa if you want more details.

Any university degree is fine but if it's not from a NAFTA country it needs a Foreign Equivalency Certification.

But from non-nafta it's not TN, right? What's the approach there? Skilled something?

No you can get a TN with it. I used my British degree.

Edit: You still need to be a Mexican or Canadian citizen.

Thank you!

No problem https://www.wes.org can certify your degree.

It's easier to get a job for a company in the U.S than it is to cross the border with a job in the U.S. If you have a degree and a job, great, otherwise no

TN1 visa allows Canadians to work in the US indefinitely in most professional-type roles e.g. teacher, engineer, accountant, etc. It doesn’t require much more than a job offer to get the visa.

It is a non-immigration visa so it isn’t a path to citizenship, just an American job. Many Canadians take advantage of this.

There was a pathway to citizenship until last week.

Immigrant intent on a TN is a big no-no

Plenty of people have filed an I-485 and been awarded Green Cards on a TN status. That was a completely acceptable path until last week.

Peter Roberts the immigration attorney that regularly posts here can validate that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36913448

“Completely acceptable” is not accurate. I’d wager that for any success story there are many stories of heartbreak due to timing and travel for TN renewal. A risk I wouldn’t advise a friend to take. But, yes, doesn’t matter anymore after last week.

Sure timing is an issue and so are the resulting travel implications of showing immigrant intent but it was 100% legal and therefore an acceptable route.

EAD/AP shows up in around 4-5 months for most people and those restrictions are then no longer a concern.

As an immigrant to Canada, I've spent considerable time comparing the numbers and while it is fact that numbers will simply be bigger in the US, the direct number comparison suggests that the "brain drain" issue is a mix of tax burden from Canada and better US opportunity.

The first thing to consider here is that Canadians are in an unique position to move to the US.

They are more likely to have family, friends, travel for leisure and business, easier work visas (TN), Canadian universities are recognized in the US, and so on.

Second thing is that for the people that have the means, moving early in life to the US might be the factor between affording the life you want with ease vs having to compromise.

Many of my friends in tech that moved are saving 1.5x to 2.5x compared to the ones that stayed.

So I don't see a way for Canada to not be a source of talent to the US market. But I also don't believe that is the most interesting question.

The question that I believe matters most here from a society/economy perspective is: is Canada's economy providing the right incentives for innovation and entrepreneurship?

From that perspective the first thing that needs to be addressed is that we can't compare only taxes rates and income.

Canada has a very different tax system, where being able to maximize your TFSA and RRSP will probably set you up pretty well for retirement. Cost of housing is high, but cost of borrowing can be much lower than similar US mortgages. Canadian taxes also include healthcare that is more efficient (cost wise) than the American model.

So while you can get rich faster in the US, the reality is that you will need a lot less income to achieve similar quality of life depending on the cities you are comparing.

My personal notes for Vancouver, BC vs Seattle, WA concluded that for a family of 2. The gross income required to live a fair life that includes: - owning a decent property - be able to retire with no need to reduce cost of living - taking vacations and going out often - hedging health costs You are looking for around 200k CAD vs 250k USD of steady yearly income.

Those incomes are very achievable in both places for people that are considered top talent and companies can provide such income locally.

On the tax side, Canada could improve, but I don't believe that lowering taxes will bring much value.

Where Canada seems to struggle is on the regulation side. Canada is aligned with the US, which means that when addressing the Canadian market, your business is most likely also able to easily address the US market. This means that you will probably be better of setting up your center of operations in the US and not in Canada.

At the same time, big Canadian focused corporations operate mostly in an Oligopoly way. Smaller companies need to fight both regulatory requirements that didn't exist before and have a harder time getting the money they need to scale operations.

Adopting European (and Asian) standards could severely improve competition as companies could more easily extend operations into Canada without having to also support the US market, while in the long term Canadian companies would be able to choose the regulations that give their products the access to the most appropriate markets.

Today is full of evergreen headlines.

I know a few smart people from Europe who went to the USA. Several of the smartest went to Canada in Trump 1. More have followed now. They still prefer Canada above returning to the EU, even if it is legally harder.

Not really new, been going on for decades. With recent political changes I would have assumed it might have been getting better actually. I'm guilty, Canadian living in the SF Bay area.

Back in 2019 Microsoft sent job offer, 145k usd/yr base moving to SF. Couldn't get visa (no degree). New offer: 95k cad/yr in Vancouver

I've done well since then, but being in Canada I'm always "out of band". Implicit implication that I should move south where lower level positions already match Canadian bands

What you and hiddenthrowaway wrote is consistent with my understanding, that Canadian FAANG offices are staffed mostly with those who cannot (and often will never get) a US visa, plus the odd local who doesn't want to move to the US for personal or family reasons.

indeed, I saw that first hand at MS Vancouver office

What would you say the ratio is? 10:1? 20:1?

I'm pretty introverted & this was years ago. But I didn't run into other Canadians & overheard chatter being in open office layout

The cope about this "not being new" is pretty typical denial I'm glad to have left up there.

Should be completely dwarfed by everyone end their dog fleeing Trump's fascist wasteland to Canada right?

that's what happens when your only industries are cooking oil, actual oil, and real estate

Ok, but how does your hypothetical scenario apply to Canada though?

I've heard Canada described as three mining companies standing on each other wearing a trenchcoat.

Not bad, although it seriously undercounts the sheer number of Canadian (and other) mineral resource companies calling the Toronto TSX home and ignores the fossil fuel energy extraction behemoths.

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