Tech salaries in Canada are already ridiculously low compared to the states. 10k new tech workers is not insignificant in Canada, so this will just lower them further.<p>Not to mention our housing is in a ridiculous bubble and our economy in general isn’t in great shape.<p>I suspect there may be an increase of TN visa applications / brain drain of existing Canadian tech workers.
I guess it's good they'll ostensibly be able to attract more talent from other countries, but I think they need to fix their own brain drain problem in the first place.<p>- A Canadian living in the US
Canada is a tough cell. This story from a couple of weeks ago. "I respect myself too much to stay in Canada" was an article that got a lot of traction.
<a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2023/06/11/i-respect-myself-too-much-to-stay-in-canada-why-so-many-new-immigrants-are-leaving.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2023/06/11/i-respect-mys...</a><p>Just remember, Canada is geographically situated near the US but their attitudes to innovation, risk taking, rewarding talent, and merit based promotion are not the same. Even if they say that it is - the reality is very different.
A lot of folks complaining about Canadian wages make a fair point - CoL is too high.<p>But, they are only comparing against the US. If you start comparing against the rest of the world, Canada is the only non-declining large economy.<p>Wages in Canada are second only to the US. AI (industry of the future) has a base in Canada that is non-trivial. Canada is getting more internationally connected, which means more business.<p>Compare with UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, where else is the economy looking at the industries of the next decade?<p>Tech is the easiest industry to bootstrap - just get more tech people to create the ecosystem. And Canada was looking for immigrants. This move to poach h1bs from the US is no different from Meta poaching from Google back in the 00s.
I guess permanent residency is better than an H-1B, but Canadian salaries are pretty low, from what I hear. I figure most people in (e.g) India would keep trying for the US
I don't even earn 50% of the equivalent job in the US.
And I'm not even talking about jobs in huge tech hubs like SF.
Add to that ~35% taxes that are deduced from my salary plus 15% of sale taxes on everything that I buy that are already priced higher than in the US plus insane housing price plus gas that costs nearly two times more, plus, plus, plus....
Nearly everyone that was in the top 30% of my university cohord moved abroad. I'm only staying because of my family but I'm planning to leave soon if the economy doesn't turn to crap.
Canada is just a very badly managed country overall. The tech industry basically thrives off goverment subsidies and tax credits. This can't go on forever.
This is a maquiladora strategy. A maquiladora is <i>"a foreign-owned factory at which imported parts are assembled by lower-paid workers into products for export"</i><p>What's frustrating about it is that it's an expression of contempt for Canada's nationals by a governing class whose capital is already managed globally, so in their view, what does it matter if they import cheap labour and disincentivize capital growth with new industry when they can just tax farm income from a permanent underclass of workers who bring in salaries from foreign revenue?<p>It would be great if the H1-B's were coming here to do startups, but startups are the artifact of a uniquely American capital ecosystem that just doesn't exist anywhere else, and you can't reproduce something that was the effect of factors that were a moment in time. The strategy is just another expression of contempt of the citizenry by Ottawa. This cohort of government always goes on about how "diversity is our strength," but the emphasis has always been on the <i>our</i> part, meaning theirs, and increasingly at the expense of everyone else.
... they gonna make it easier for US citizen remote tech workers to pursue PR status without having to find a Canadian employer first (and, so, take a big pay cut)? I'd love to move my family there and start paying our way-above-median-income taxes to Canada instead of the US, but struggle to make the minimum score for immigration in any Canadian province despite having the advantages of the right kind of career and degree (and, actually, I think we've aged out of making the cut in <i>any</i> of them, now, as of the last year or two).<p>[EDIT] To be clear, I get why this narrow slice of the population isn't one they're worried about bending their immigration system to accommodate, and I'm not mad about it, it'd just be really cool if we accidentally got helped by some other, larger reform.
But where will these new people stay? There is not enough housing being built for people, you are going to see people come here only to leave when they realize that they can't afford the housing for their families there.<p>Net migration is probably pretty high in Canada right now and will increase once people figure out that there is not enough density or proper housing for them.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came_to_canada_3_years_ago_and_now_leaving_due_to/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/ontario_get_readyyoure_going_to_lose_your/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/onta...</a><p>I am waiting to see what the cabinet shuffle looks like, but we are probably going to run some billboard campaigns or do some fundraising soon to address the housing crisis if the government is not tackling this properly. If you are Canadian or have interest in this space on addressing these social issues, hit me up.<p>If you are in a TN-1 visa, I strongly recommend doing the math to see if you want to spend a significant amount of your income on rent, definitely do your research.
Related ongoing thread:<p><i>Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries permits</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505152">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505152</a> - June 2023 (232 comments)
So, on one hand we have that "Tech Talent Strategy", which I assume comes from the demand for more IT workers globally. On the other, we have Canadians such as yours truly who would like to upgrade from a Helpdesk position sooner rather than later. I realize that sample size=1, but why don't we properly train permanent residents instead?<p>(Also don't forget the IT job market which has slowed practically to a halt, as a direct opposite of that Strategy)