Canadians are leaving the country at record levels. Can anyone solve this?

How is that different from any other country except maybe Japan?

I'm one of those Canadians with a Ph.D. who left for the U.S.

I didn't actually want to leave, but I was staring at the prospect of not unemployment, but underemployment.

Canadian industry doesn't really that many companies that can absorb Ph.Ds. It's not a money issue -- I was willing to accept Canadian pay. This was ca 2010s, and there were very few homegrown Canadian companies that had enough scale to need high level R&D (this was before Shopify and the rest). It was either you did your own startup and found your own funding or you worked entry level engineering jobs doing things like testing or audit work.

All the design and original engineering work happened at HQ in the US or Europe -- the Canadian office is usually just a branch office.

In the US, it's analogous to Chicago offices of big tech firms. They're just marketing and sales offices -- the real engineering work happened on the coasts (SF/Seattle or NYC).

So I reluctantly left Canada for a US company that although not famous, had a global footprint. Whatever I worked on immediatley had global impact because engineering was done in the US office and replicated worldwide. I learned a lot about how to operate at scale and over international markets.

Canada is a small country that has an education system that punches above its weight -- Canadian schools are excellent. But it has an industry that unfortunately doesn't. Somehow Canada has tried and failed a few times, with Nortel, with Blackberry, etc. to develop champions. Something is preventing Canadian companies from scaling. Even far smaller countries like Sweden have companies that are global (IKEA, Saab, Volvo etc), so I'm not sure why we can't do it too.

Maybe the old saying that Canadians are "hewers of wood and drawers of water" has some truth -- it's easier to extract resources than to compete on differentiated product.

FYI most Canadian immigrants also leave Canada once they become Canadian. Plenty of my family did that, and if we didn't first immigrate to the US we would have done the same as well decades ago.

Canada was dealing with a brain drain well before TFWPs and LMIAs were a thing - all the way back to Thomas Edison's family.

> If young people want to enter the capitalist thunderdome we should encourage them to go off to the U.S. and instead focus on raising a generation that isn’t interested in money at any cost...

How are provinces supposed to manage their finances long term if much of Canada's industry and talent leaves?

Canada's economic complexity index [0] is on par with Serbia [1] and Bulgaria [2].

[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124/export-complexit...

[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/688/export-complexit...

[2] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/100/export-complexit...

Wouldn't a free-trade and free-labor-movement treaty suffice for this purpose? I'd worry about Canada joining the US. The end state of most Anglophone nations is their universities full of Jason Ardays, their governments full of David Camerons, and their hip-fracture wait times set to 30 days. The closer culturally to the source, England, the worse the problem. Despite some of the worst foreign and domestic policies of this new century under the current US administration, we've demonstrated some amount of resistance to this corrosive nature that seems to spread through the English language.

Either Canada would immediately be the largest state and deliver a massive House majority to one obvious party or, if the provinces joined separately, an overwhelming Senatorial majority to that same party. I don't think that's desirable for the US.

Personally, Ben, I also think that US foreign policy of massive encirclement on the globe through mutual-defense agreements was a pincer move of super-strategic performance considering the ramifications it has had on our real opponents. Canada, I think, is best dealt with as a close ally whose borders represent a point our enemies cannot cross. We don't want their politics and I think we'd love to have their workers and they'd like the remittances. My position on this is like Ronald Reagan's or George H.W. Bush's.

Here's Reagan (on Mexico, but I think it works - we should expand the TN to be transferable to an LPR and weaken the labor requirement so that you get it so long as you're not a criminal):

> Why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems and make it possible for them to come here legally, with a work permit, and then while they are working and earning here, they pay taxes here? And when they want to go back, they can go back, and they can cross. And open the border both ways, by understanding their problems.

To say nothing of the fact that, free of our federal government and its laws, it may well be possible to have Canada run massive shipyards, nuclear power, and drone factories in a manner that we have painted ourselves out of. Allowing for an independent jurisdiction in this way gives the West a lot of freedom.

>I thought they were saying that ~~Americans~~ professors of gender studies were the ones leaving the US to be free and prosper in Canada. What happened with that?

FTFY

Are you surprised reddit is not fully informed?

Ontario and BC do a lot of the heavy lifting there though. e.g. every Canadian province other than those two has better housing affordability than California and most of the other provinces average around the same affordability as New York, New Hampshire, or Colorado.

Says the person who doesn't understand the differences between authoritarian communism, authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, democratic socialism, and social democracy.

It has enough truth to convince some that the whole is true, but there is a lot more untruth than truth in it. It sounds like the type of propaganda a country would publish in another country it was trying to destroy economically and socially.

As an educated young professional who emigrated from Canada, car dependency and low density cities were major reasons I left. Suburban sprawl is a prison without a car, and I have no intentions of driving. With that said, I clearly don't fit the profile in the article perfectly, since most of my fellow emigrants are going to the US, which has those same issues.