Canadians are considered nice but what drives that is a desperate fear of conflict or being perceived as 'negative'. It is debilitating and starkly clashes with some of the cultures that are now immigrating in to the country.<p>Business and employees here are universally perceived as suckers and ripe for fleecing which gives the country a poor reputation. The reality is that there are a lot of people here who are naive, but there are also many very skilled, experienced and capable people. Again culture clash.<p>Cost of living here is becoming almost impossible for the average person, with few places to go as most of the country does not have infrastructure to cope with those even there. There is a profound difference in politics and tolerance between cities and smaller town, so: yup, more culture clash.<p>While most of the world let inflation happen, Canada basically stalled inflation and placated citizens with cheap Chinese goods, and low interest rates. The result is that inflation is that Canadians are now priced out of their own country, inflation is accelerating and interest rates are creeping up.<p>In order to prop up profits and stave off economic collapse Canada brings in over 500,000 legal immigrants annually. The result is a massive strain on infrastructure which governments have been cost cutting for decades. Tensions are high and you can definitely see it in the moods and attitudes of people, especially on the roads.<p>Money parking and laundering are a huge problem here with little enforcement. Foreigners are buying property as fast as they can to aid in immigration applications and to hide their money from their own governments. The result is that property values have skyrocketed well beyond the reach of even tech sector workers.<p>Canada has some maturing to do and decisions to make like investing in the future rather than simply relying on population growth.
Canada's economy is pretend, driven by government spending instead of any real industry. Anything that grows remotely big enough to threaten our various oligopolies will get bought or regulated out of business anyway. If you look at our startup investments, it's all pretend, with most being led by BDC or CDPQ which are government agencies. It's just some bureaucrats playing a game to give money to some favored elites and rent seekers, not a serious economy.<p>From what I know shopify appears to be the exception to the rule and has grown to have a real international company in spite of being Canadian. So I belive Lütke is a credible voice in criticizing Canada's business culture.
Here are my top points about Canada after having lived there for a decade:<p>1. They are not nice. They are timid. They can bitch behind your back.<p>2. Extreme fear of standing out. Extreme risk aversion. No startup pockets where investors are hanging out to invest a seed round in "just an idea".<p>3. No competition in the markets. Oligarchies rule the roost.<p>4. Low quality immigration from India gone crazy. If you are close to GTA, every single system will fail due to the massive amounts of low quality workers from India entering through fraudulent systems.<p>5. Everything is more expensive and lower quality than the US.<p>6. Healthcare is non existent unless you have a terminal disease. Nothing works.<p>So the vicious mix of low energy citizens with low quality immigrants makes Canada the most overrated country in the "developed world."
Outside of the tech: one of the biggest misconceptions that Canadians are nice, while in fact we are on the top of the pyramid when in it comes to passive aggressive and covert behaviors.
Canadian here. No chance we have a globally competitive horse in this race. We have completed the transition to middling non-Germany European country culturally. People aspire to work 30 hours a week and have interesting hobbies, tech is scary. I say this in a value neutral way as someone based in Waterloo which appears to have almost no startups left.
All this shows is how ignorant Sam Altman is about Canada. Montréal is already the AI hub of Canada. Yoshua Bengio has done so much there for the local scene with MILA and Element AI. Tons of other companies have their Canadian AI teams in Montréal and not Toronto, including Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta.
The actual title is: “The revolution has launched”: OpenAI’s Sam Altman charts the promise and peril of AI at Toronto event<p>The word "nice" is not found anywhere in the article, which is good because it's inaccurate