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Why would a Canadian who has options stay when the government shows time and time again that real estate should make more money than productive members of society, and that capital should be used to inflate assets than to invest in the country's future?
How is that different from any other country except maybe Japan?
Main thing is the US is a significantly better deal than Canada is, for an educated Canadian. And migrating to the US as an educated Canadian is very easy.
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.

Bad faith article that makes no mention of the TFWP and LMIA changes which is at least 20,000 individuals

Edit: Also, the population of Canada has grown significantly (see: Century Initiative)

As a percentage of total population, net migration is the same today as it was in 2011, and lower than it was 1991-2011.

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.

Did you mean to use “most” instead of “many”? I can see many doing that, I can’t really see most doing that. If you have numbers please share.
Yep. I'm using "most" in place of many (I can't always be typing in academic prose on HN - it gets tiring at some point).

The actual number is 20% of all Canadian immigrants leave Canada within 25 years of landing [0], and this rate is 2x higher amongst Canadian immigrants with a doctorate and is elevated amongst Canadian immigrants classified as "business and finance managers, ICT professionals, engineers, and architecture managers" [1].

And speaking anecdotally amongst the Asian American/Canadian community - most who I've known who landed in Canada as skilled immigrants left Canada for the US on a TN visa once they naturalized (even with Trump in office). In a number of cases, they chose Canada simply because they couldn't make it to America on their first try.

[0] - https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/one-in-five-immigrants-a...

[1] - https://forcitizenship.ca/article/highly-skilled-immigrants-...

Not sure about all the other things, but in my experience if you found a startup and get American VC money, they more or less tell you to move the company to the US.

Then they start pressuring you to also move to the US.

So seeing that startups get drawn

Context: According to Our World in Data, as of 2024, one million people born in Canada <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...> live in the US, or about 2.4% of the 41.5 million total Canadians, while 260,000 people born in the United States <https://ourworldindata.org/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-...> live in Canada. The US's population of 338 million is eight times that of Canada's, so a Canadian is about 30 times more likely to move to the US, than an American is to move to Canada.

1.3 million Canadian-born live outside Canada, or about 3% of the Canadian population. 3.2 million American-born live outside the US, 1% of the US population.

The Canadian government's statistics as of the 2021 census (which the article cites) are slightly different: 794K Canadians by birth living in the US, 61% of the 1.3 million Canadian-born living abroad. <https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2026013...>

Who cares? Trying to compete with the U.S. is a race to the bottom. 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. There are lots of opportunities in Canada (and other countries facing the same exodus) but they aren’t going to make people rich like the U.S. will. Canada can’t be more like the U.S. without being more like the U.S. Canada isn’t perfect but do the Canadian majority really wish they were more like the U.S?
> 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...

there are many economic models, entrepreneurial talent is not a necessity for an economy to succeed. We are on a website all about startups so of course we are entrepreneurial and see the value in it as both a provider of opportunity for ourselves and our communities but it is not a universal truth that every country must obey
> Canada's economic complexity index is on par with Serbia and Bulgaria.

I've heard it said that Canada is three mining companies standing on each other wearing a trenchcoat.

There is, of course, a literal answer that few Canadians consider worth the price — yes, throw in the towel on sovereignty and join the US, so employers have access to a 10x larger market and aren't doomed to lose market & talent to US tech giants due to economy of scale.
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.

> 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.

Americans on either side of politics think that Canada is full of super-leftists (and there is no shortage), and Canadians love repeating the "Canadian Conservatives are more leftist than American Democrats" nonsense. But were Canada a part of the US in 2016, Trump would have won AB, SK, and quite possibly enough of the GTA (the parts that loved Rob Ford, and as "Ford Country" has repeatedly won the province for Doug Ford) to win ON, the province most resembling MI/WI/PA, the three states that Trump unexpectedly won the election with. 2024? Very good chance he also takes some/all of BC, MB, NS, and NL.

Going back to southern Ontario, without the NDP-voting north, it is even more a swing state that the GOP has a chance to win.

You packed a remarkable amount of wrong into this comment.
Feel free to unpack the wrong. And no, your previous

>Have you ever actually looked at the 2015 Federal Election results. SMH.

won't cut it. As I said, look into "Ford Country"'s electoral results, and AB and SK voting trends (and the whole Western alienation phenomenon, more broadly). (And if you bring up Notley, or even worse the hoary "Canadian Conservatives are more leftist than American Democrats" cope, you automatically lose.)

> Feel free to unpack the wrong.

It is stupid on its face. Ford != Trump

Trump would have won NS... because Tim Houston's Progressive Conservative party has the word "conservative" in the name? LOL

I can't keep track of these claims. I thought they were saying that Americans were the ones leaving the US to be free and prosper in Canada. What happened with that?
Are you surprised reddit is not fully informed?
>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

Housing prices in Canada make the US look affordable. But there is no political will to do anything about it.
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.
Yeah the two provinces people actually want to live in.
Which is why their housing prices are higher. Strange that, isn't it?
Kind of a stupid system if it forces people not to live in the places they want, eh?
Countries compete for FDI but they also compete for labor. Canada has high taxes, high costs and lower opportunities. They deserve to lose talent to countries who offer them a better deal.
”the United States dominates as the destination of choice”
Alternate title: net emigration as a % of total population has been steady since the 2000s
As country getting closer to the Communism, people seem to take notice.
Says the person who doesn't understand the differences between authoritarian communism, authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, democratic socialism, and social democracy.
I don't know anything about this topic and I'm not Canadian, but this has to be the most narrative destroying thing I've seen in a while.
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.
Yes. Stop toxic urbanization.

Prohibit new dense housing and slowly start deconstructing the dense office space. At the same time, promote remote work with tax incentives.

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.
Sure. All kinds of people exist.

However, properly designed cities like Houston, TX are well-poised to take advantage of self-driving cars. Very soon car ownership won't be necessary even in sparse cities, but with all the advantages of having a lot of living space and cheap housing.

Fair. I disagree with your conclusion, but I don't think it's an unfounded position to take.

Nevertheless, I imagine this is an unusually salient issue for us. I imagine for the average Canadian emigrant, the fact that the US offers a greater quantity of better quality, higher paying, jobs, is a much bigger contributor than urban planning.

Curious where you went! Europe? Japan? Singapore? I'm on a similar boat. There are a few areas in the US and Canada that aren't car dependent, but not many.
Tokyo! It's a city with its pluses and minuses, but having already spoken Japanese before coming, I enjoy the everyday life more than any other place I've been.

A big difference I would say between a place like Tokyo and most urbanist cities in NA is that public transit is overwhelmingly the default here. My experience is that even in Vancouver or Montreal, it wouldn't be strange to have an acquaintance or relative who lives in one of the extended suburbs or a neighboring city, and for whom driving is default.