If I were doing data science, I would be in Toronto, Ottawa, or Waterloo. Given the customers with enough data for that in Canada are almost all institutional, and that's where they are. You could go to Victoria, which is the capital city of BC where it's mainly government driven work, but there isn't going to be a big growth story there.<p>You can make a living and have a comfortable lifestyle in Canada, but it is not the best place to create or build wealth. It's where to be if you bring it with you.<p>Given the small and dispersed distribution of the population, startup level growth mainly comes from access to the US market. Access to the US market tends to mean being HQ'd there, so you get quite a few "offshored," engineering and development shops to take advantage of the currency, SRED tax credits, COL and salary differences, where the US HQ handles the revenue, product management, marketing, equity, M&A and other business decisions.<p>The two main markets for enterprise products and dev are Toronto and Ottawa. There are only five notable banks with offices across the country and around the world, who share a largely homogeneous enterprise tech culture. Health care is a public sector business, and there is lots of opportunity to make a living in health care tech, but it is managed as a sprawling enterprise centralized economy that acts as a ceiling on growth. There are some notable examples, but they use Canada as a proving ground before going to market in the US.<p>The way most entrepreneurial money appears to be made in Canada is by operating "recruiting and consulting firms," which provide institutions with arms length contractors that they can add and remove at will instead of dealing with the challenges of employees.<p>Quality of life compared to american cities in decline is incomparably better. The hard part is affording it. Owning a an actual house near a metropolitan area is out of reach for first time home buyers, and places with affordable housing are outside commuting distance from anywhere that does software development. Short term rentals have sent rents skyrocketing everywhere within a 90-minute drive to Toronto.<p>If you are already on the property ladder where you are, using that as leverage to buy a place here is the best way to do it. If you are not, it's smarter to get the capital from selling your first house as a downpayment to get you into something in Canada, as real estate is basically the only way for working people to build wealth.