The Canadian government on the one hand is trying to position Canada as an international tech leader, while on the other hand are trying to implement laws that are fundamentally at odds with tech norms (i.e. trying to force companies to pay for links with Bill C-18).
It's nice to have the tech workers. But will the tech employers want to invest in a regulatory basket-case country?
> The Canadian government on the one hand is trying to position Canada as an international tech leader
No they're not, they're trying to keep the property bubble alive, artificially inflate gdp growth and drive down wages for the oligarchs who want to keep their fiefs. It has nothing to do with tech leadership.
Why would the government be incentivized to drive down wages? That seems fundamentally at odds with the concept of income and sales tax, which account for a very large portion of revenue that funds most programs.
I'm fairly certain the Canadian government has more strength, more endurance, and more defendable resources, then all major tech companies on Earth combined have at their disposal, if they fully set all their efforts in that direction. But this is idle fantasizing regarding extreme scenarios either way.
In reality they likely will commit a small fraction to it and only a small fraction of interested tech companies may loosely coordinate against it. Even in that case I think they have better then 50-50 odds of seeing it through.
Seriously - if you took the profits from a single tech company ($60 billion for Google in 2022), you'd be able to single-handedly influence every major election in Canada to the point of basically picking the winners. The organizational power of Canada doesn't really matter when the entirety of it can be bought and sold by a single tech company.
I am only familiar with US elections, and I agree that it's a rigged system but it does still function a little bit in terms of if things were actually really, really bad, the election system would still work to improve things back to the admittedly sort of crappy status quo. The main reason it fails to work aside from the way its systemically rigged is voter apathy, misinformation, and a lack of critical thinking.
> I'm fairly certain the Canadian government has more strength, more endurance, and more defendable resources, then all tech companies on Earth, combined, if they fully set all their efforts in that direction.
This seems like a weird point to bring up in this context. The only thing that matters for a tech company to "defeat" Canada over this regulatory bill is whether the population cares enough to make this topic a voting issue. Canada's GDP and mineral resources don't really help it win this kind of "war". I don't really think we expected Zuckerberg to lead the Meta-Battalion across the 49th parallel just to get CBC articles on Facebook sans-tariff.
> The only thing that matters for a tech company to "defeat" Canada over this regulatory bill is whether the population cares enough to make this topic a voting issue.
Canada does not operate on the US system in terms of politics, it's much more like the UK in that regard.
We may wear different colored suits, but Canada and the US are both plutocracies and honestly Canada is much more severely so.
Take just about any industry in Canada and there's between one and five major enterprises that the government is VERY in bed with and fights tooth and nail to keep out competition.
it is very much falling in line with US politics -- speaking as someone in Canada who used to hear conversations about what a bitch Hilary is while at the YMCA.
I got stuck in traffic behind an anti-vax convoy that had "don't tread on me" flags. saw at least one confederate flag. on big Ford or Dodge trucks, too.
Alberta even had a real push for a second to ban gay marriage. wouldn't have survived a federal charter challenge, but it's there. Ontario has a mini-Trump (Ford #2) who is actively trying to privatize everything.
there may be a parliamentary style gov, but the tone, tenor, and driving factors like the urban-rural divide are much closer to the US.
> Canada's GDP and mineral resources don't really help it win this kind of "war".
The USA would like access to those resources, and during trade negotiations, some industries need to be sacrificed (impose tariffs) in order to get access to them.
A large number (majority?) of these applicants are Indians on h1b in the US using Canada as a backup in lieu of going back to India. It's insurance against layoffs, not being able to get a Green Card, etc.
It remains to be seen how many actually move. And after moving how many actually stay for long or try to come back to the US on a TN or L1 visa.
I would bet most won't end up staying in Canada long term.
I bet that none will wind up in Canada. The scenario here is being fired in USA, and the visa holder clearly want to be in USA, not Canada, otherwise they'd be in Canada already. So the scenario lets say comes to pass, mass USA layoffs at tech companies hiring H1Bs. Why would Canadian tech companies (Which tech companies BTW?) be hiring while everyone else is firing the cheapest labor force available? Just my thoughts. I have worked with many visa holders in USA and their biggest fear is layoffs due to having to leave USA. But every visa holder I know who was laid off (had a big layoff at my company), was hired less than 1 month after they layoff in USA.
This is not actually true. The only advantage Canada has, for Indian immigrants in particular, is a skill-based immigration program that is fast and does not discriminate based on the country that they're from.
Canada allows a lot less family-based immigration than the US. Parent-sponsoring permanent residences are limited to 10,000/year compared to no cap in the US.
Overall it's the opposite. The US places a heavy emphasis on family-based immigration vs Canada that puts most of their emphasis on point-based skilled immigration.
that's been heavily altered in the last few years.
you can still do so, but the application process has changed to a lottery system, where you get pulled and are then your family is invited to apply. wait time may take years and its not a guarantee.
source: am in Canada, know people who have done it, have done so myself
As tech worker in Canada I'm a big fan of this as I feel there's no ceiling in which the tech industry can find itself saturated. We need to continue evolving towards a tech industry, particularly as the energy sector undergoes a major reform. Would I like to be paid more? Always. But not through putting walls up to artificially inflate the value of my role in the economy at the cost of Canada's economic future.
There's a ton of months-old accounts here with very low karma loading the comments section up with feckless cowardice in the form of anti-government, anti-immigration, unthinking garbage. Seriously, click on a bunch and see.
There's a LOT of valid criticism about Canada's economic situation. But carefully observe how every one of those comments plays on your fears and anxieties. They speak with hyperbole and aggression. They're trying to manipulate you through your instincts.
You appear to work remote for a US firm, which makes this a bit humorous. Actual recent graduates trying to find work in tech in Canada -- even accepting the enormous domestic discount -- are meeting a wall. Actual low income residents who have literally zero housing options and are ending up legitimately homeless...hey, you got yours, so too bad.
>There's a ton of months-old accounts ... They're trying to manipulate you through your instincts.
Such brazen attempts to disqualify any opposing viewpoints is so shameless.
Canada is at a legitimate crisis level right now, and it is just more fuel on the fire. If you think this is simply a play on fears and anxieties, you have a harsh disconnect from reality.
nothing you describe is new or unique to Canada, and the same problems are happening in China, Europe, and the US.
I agree with the parent in that shillbots are out of control, and are visible across several domains, and not just about Canada -- anything vaguely or political seems to be getting it extra hard as of late. there has been a notable uptick on reddit, twitter, lemmy, HN, etc.
certainly someone with "ML learning fanantic" in their profile can grasp how incredibly easy it is to use GPT-3 to abuse HN and similar platforms.
Canada had the highest immigration in the developed world in absolute numbers, which is positively insane. Canada has the most overleveraged housing in the world. Canada has the lowest availability rate of housing. Canada's productivity has been constantly falling off of its peers. Canada's wage gap with the US for skilled workers is large and growing. Canada has more international students than the US, a country with 12x more student spaces. Canada has a massive foreign worker program. All of these have exploded over the past few years, and are very much new and hitting the breaking point.
These are all entirely unique. But the [hand wave] "yeah everywhere is bad yo" bit is a common retort.
At the risk of sounding like I'm flaming - which I'm not - it seems like a pretty privileged viewpoint for you to posit that the recent trend of more people raising concerns about cost of living and wages are simply anti-government or anti-immigrant.
Groceries have gone up in price. Shelter has gone up in price for both renting and buying. Healthcare is in shambles. Wages haven't been keeping up with inflation the last decade+, let alone the past two years.
Yes, I understand the entire world is reeling from a pandemic and horrific monetary policies put in place by said governments and corporations that manipulate it for their own gain.
The government has chosen to enact policies against the best interest of most of its citizens - at least those making less than $100k/year - and they continue to do so at the expense of everybody.
What will be the "straw that breaks the camel's back" for the majority of Canadians to finally realize that their government doesn't care about them and only cares about bringing in more foreign money to prop up the absolute sham of a "housing market" they have while suppressing wages for lower level entry positions like service industries or entry-level IT jobs?
This comment is just my observations about the nature of comments regarding Canada. I'm not trying to lean one way or another by writing this...
I can't speak to the honesty, atroturfing, propaganda, whatever you wanna call it, but online I've noticed a general negative tone and attitude towards the Canadian economy and government. Very little of the opinion pieces I see say anything good. By opinion pieces I refer to HN/Reddit, not news corporations. It's very one sided online.
There is a TON of astroturfing going on. And we've got a Conservative Party leader who is happy to encourage the classic cowardice-based attitudes about how the immigrants other easy targets are to blame for it all. Basically, "this is a very complex situation but I want to be elected so I'll distill it down to something raw and emotional for votes."
But that's really just a symptom of the fact that there are very real economic problems here. Climate change is becoming a disaster. Economic ripples from COVID continue. The housing market is completely broken. Inflation up.
When times are tough, people get scared. When people get scared, they respond more to emotion and impulse than logic and reason. That creates a market for charlatans who will give them simple explanations and simple solutions.
This is just some partisan talking points. Certainly you're not the only one with this view but it doesnt represent even the majority in Canada, and everyone that disagrees with you are not astroturfers or people who have been scared into seeking simple solutions. I see this "everyone who doesn't think like me must have been manipulated" garbage every day online and it's extremely offensive. People can think for themselves and come up with a different conclusion than yours, which is essentially the most orthodox mainstream media view there is.
Getting fed up with the current party that's in power is a reoccurring theme in Canadian politics going back many decades. It's a pattern the repeats over and over. It would be extraordinary if Canadians weren't getting sick of a government that's been in power for going on 9 years.
Polling data shows that the recent slide in approval is coming mostly from Liberal and NDP voters.
Apologies for the lengthy reply, however I simply had to write a more detailed comment for other readers.
>And we've got a Conservative Party leader
So you have adopted your "everything is fine [just ignore that the house is on fire]" position purely for partisan reasons? You convince yourself that everyone with a different position than you is actually some astroturfing Conservative operative? I hope you realize how intellectually dishonest that is.
I detest PP and his veneer of populism and conspiracy theory adjacency. But no amount of fairytales or painting over can change the absolutely dire situation in Canada right now, and I would be absolutely ashamed to try to paint this as okay because I want the current guy to win.
Canada added a million+ new residents in the past year, and continues at that staggering clip. This is a rate that makes developing countries blush[1]. In absolute numbers it beat every other developed country in population growth. Not per capita, absolute numbers. All despite the fact that there is an enormous housing crisis and housing starts have actually dropped (though if they didn't they couldn't accommodate 1/4 that rate). Millions of Canadians are in the perilous situation of being unable to afford housing if their current situation demanded it, anxiously worry about the next mortgage renewal or that their landlord decides to pull a renoviction. People are staying with abusive partners, and children are going to be living with their parents indefinitely. Fertility rates were bad and now they're going to devastated.
Economic homelessness -- not mental illness or substance abuse -- is exploding.
There was a time when you might get priced out of the big city, but now there literally is nothing left. For those falling through the cracks there are no cheap areas left anywhere in the country.
But don't worry -- we can solve the housing crisis by, they claim, more immigration. And when that fails I'll let you fill in the blanks with the solution, so long as you guess "more immigration". This government has been selling rolls of quarters for a nickel and then demanding more rolls to make up for the losses.
Every ill just demands more immigration to this government. And to the governments before, and likely the government after, because ever questioning immigration was verboten, forbidden under the guise that despite Canada being a hugely diverse country built by immigrants, if you questioned immigration levels you clearly must be a racist.
Wage suppression is Canada's "competitiveness" (our productivity gap just keeps increasing. In Canada you don't automate or seek efficiencies, you just demand the government give you an army of TFWs. We have a GDP per capita below Alabama and dropping).
Canada's best tech workers leave to the US, so just import foreign workers who couldn't get into the US, or who are poised to get sent out from the US. What a loser strategy. We do the same with scientists and doctors. The best go to the US, so just accept the sloppy seconds from elsewhere.
Canada has more international "students" than the United States, despite having 1/12th the student spaces. And I quote students because many are students of strip mall diploma mills, taking advantage of the fact that this government gave them a full work permit and is a track towards permanent residency, whereupon they can sponsor their family from home as well who funded this adventure. Get a full time job, live 8 to a basement for a slumlord and hit up the food bank for food. This is happening en masse right now. It is scandalous exploitation.
Canada has a massive temporary foreign worker program using wage suppressing foreign labour at staggering rates in critical positions like...factory worker and fast food worker. Under this purportedly "progressive" government the program, like the rate of immigration and the number of "students", has exploded.
It is because I am a progressive that I find all of this disgusting. We are at the end stages of some of the most hostile anti-worker policies conceivable. So while this announcement is just a raindrop in a downpour, that doesn't excuse it when the country is flooding.
[1] - Like all developed countries Canada has a birth rate deficiency, and is a nation of immigrants that relies upon immigration for continued health. The actual deficiency is 1/4 the current pace of intake, however.
I find it absolutely stunning that all this is going on - and yet people still can't see what's happening in front of their eyes.
Immigration needs to slow down _massively_ - it doesn't need to stop and I don't want it to stop either.
I'd be 1000% more likely to support increased immigration if we had the services and resources in place to support new Canadians. Zero questions asked.
But right now? Healthcare is busted - immigration policies are busted - housing markets are busted...
Canada does not care about its workers. Their immigration policy shows it for all to see.
I would love to immigrate to Canada. However, my Express Entry score is lower than that of twenty-somethings, so I have yet to get picked up in a round.
I'm hopeful I'll get picked in one of the new tech rounds, but we'll see.
Are you saying this change will result in a lower gdp? How do you figure that? Usually it would mean that Canadian companies can get more done for less money right thus boosting overall gdp?
>Canada’s population growth will likely slow from its current frantic pace as immigration officials work through the pandemic backlog of applications, but not by all that much. Barring a vast improvement in productivity, Canada’s per-capita GDP – and our standard of living – appear headed for an outright decline.
Canadians simply make less. At a large, well-known company my partner works for they can trade one US req for two Canadian reqs.
TBH I don’t know why some places even bother hiring American devs. Canucks are half-priced and I can’t tell the difference working with a mix of US and Canadian employees.
I couldn't agree more. Canada is a perfect place for near-shoring: high quality, cheap labour with none of the timezone or language issues. It's mystifying why we don't see more demand.
I worked for a company with a Canadian arm and we had very few Canucks in development roles, and the few we had were Quebecois, and they were acqui-hired. Anyone getting hired by an American company is looking to immigrate.
> Anyone getting hired by an American company is looking to immigrate.
Absolutely not true. I just left an American company composed of 1/3rd Canadians and none have demonstrated an interest in relocating. I could go into the many reasons why that might be, but things would get pretty political pretty quickly...
I don’t think most Canadians want to migrate to the US. Some do, but most Canadians don’t see the US with good eyes. Especially because of the price of healthcare and the guns.
I've sure seen it happen a lot though. I think it helps when they visit the midwest and see that traffic is so much nicer here and realize that the whole gun violence thing is grossly overhyped in their media. Then they look at the housing and realize that the can afford a house that's twice the size for half the price in a great neighborhood. Oh, and you get a raise -- a big one.
America isn't the murderous hellscape that many Canadians think it is.
I've done that more or less since 2015. it's not easy, and I was lucky to have a large group of generally well-connected coworkers and peers from jobs I worked in the US.
Generally not possible for the average Canadian unless they've got 80% percentile tech skills, and/or did some time working in the US.
Not sure why it isn't more common, even if salaries stay roughly equal (after conversion to CAD), there is tremendous savings to be had just in health insurance costs alone.
Remote jobs tend to pay less, and taxes are higher in Canada. I think you can’t beat going to the U.S. on purely financial considerations. But there’s always other factors to consider, so it’s a decent compromise.
I do work for an American company but with Canadian branches. I doubled my salary over Canadian tech companies but still only make 50-60% what my American peers make.
Stay away from those ones with Canadian branches, unless you must have the office experience. They always scale pay by location. Corollary, stay away from companies that pay by location when seeking remote work, unless you live in a very expensive location.
Same story for me at my last company, which started up in Canada but then relocated headquarters to the US. Why? Access to funding and industry partners.
I was making great money compared to my local peers. But compared to my American colleagues I was making half.
Curious are you paid less with comparable cost of living of american peers I.e. are you comparing with NY or Bay Area salaries or median American for same skills?
If my CoL is higher living in the Bay Area I would then expect to be compensated for that , and that seems fair .
Even when paid higher the quality of life and net savings people living in high CoL areas have are considerably less than in low CoL so am not sure it is better to have the higher compensation
Enjoy your poverty. Basement apartment for 3k a month, cost of food and everything else more expensive, taxed at 45% and even double taxed, so your 60-100k becomes more like 35k-55k. You will live paycheck to paycheck if you're lucky to find a job. California, NY, TX, etc are full of Canadian Tech workers that were lucky to escape.
Others can comment with their experience but my guess was informed by recent job searches and forums, albeit not for this title. Doing a search right now for a Staff Engineer in Toronto seems to hint at 180 - 200K CAD being the upper limit.
You are an outlier and only because you work for an American Company that pays you what they might pay locally in SF. Perhaps they don't know they could pay you 1/2 of that easily....
If you're a US citizen you are only allowed to make last I looked 127k USD if working in Canada (or anywhere else). After 127k USD any money earned is taxed by the USA. But not to worry, if you go to Canada for a tech job you won't earn anywhere near 127k USD. You'll be very lucky to earn a 100k CAD and that will amount to about 58k or less take home. Rent will eat at least 35k of that which doesn't leave much for everything else. After all is said and done you are living hand to mouth and forget ever trying to settle down and buy a house or maybe even a 500sq/ft Condo, both will require decades of saving for just a down payment.
If you live away from civilization, and I mean really isolated, like 20 hours driving to get to a nice city, you are still gonna pay roughly 1000 dollars for a 1 bedroom apartment
Hi. I live alone in downtown Montreal. I pay 999 CAD a month for a 1-bedroom apartment, sublet. This includes furniture, electricity, heat, Internet.
I have friends who are renting a shared flat, works out to ~650 CAD / person, in a nice area (Plateau Mont Royal).
I'm not claiming two data points are representative of the whole distribution, and things are not great at all in terms of inflation / the housing market is tough, but there's no need to resort to gross exaggerations.
I do not mean to discount your experience; I'm simply disproving the assertion that there isn't anywhere normal priced. Montreal is a major city with a lot of tech companies and research activity, so I think it is worth mentioning as more than a simple counterexample.
Literally the only reason that the US is attracting the best talent is that the pay is the highest by far there. Nothing is going to change that position unless salaries increase in other countries (or crash in the US, in the glass half empty version). So I don't understand the triumphant rhetoric about "poaching" tech workers from the US.
I'm seeing a lot of replies along the lines of "what does Canada have to offer me as a US tech worker?".
I gather from the tone and from the fact that this is even being asked that these people are US-born, or at the very least have had some easy path to permanent residency.
The linked article clearly explains that this is aimed at H1-B workers in the US, and it goes into plenty of detail about what Canada is offering them that the US isn't.
I've lived in Canada long enough to be able to answer that question.
> what does Canada offer me?
Cold weather, poutine, "eh", higher taxes, free health care, and American culture light. Whether they want to admit it or not, Canada is basically America with an identity crisis of claiming to not be America.
You can still own guns in Canada and about a quarter of Canadians do.
Misleading title. 48hrs isn't any sort of rate. The 10K is pent-up demand.
> Canada’s immigration ministry has been asked by Canadian tech employers to extend a program launched last month that has seen 10,000 foreign tech workers in the U.S apply for permanent residence in Canada.
What a joke! The majority of those workers were H1Bs aka indians. Canada just took more Indian workers and saturated their already over burdened labor and property markets.
If you're a native Canadian, you'd behoove yourself to not leave Canada and get a job in the States where you can make way more and have the opportunity to actually afford a house or at least a condo.
> Healthcare
If you're a tech worker, you won't be unemployed long enough to even have to worry about losing it and even if you do Obamacare will cover you just fine.
Poached is indeed a bad term. But from what I understood, they have not employed any new worker, they just gave them visas, most should be still working for US companies, and are using this as an escape plan in case their US Visas are not extended to avoid returning to their original country.
A better way to phrase it is "Canada has employed 10k people in America in 48 hours". But that isn't worthy of being pointlessly outraged by everyday language.
Not even employed. Just "10K H1b workers applied for the permit in 48 hours". No guarantee that they will follow through with the application or have jobs.
I'm all for immigration, but I'm not a fan of companies benefiting from cheap labour and driving down our already middling tech industry salaries. Brain drain to the US is already a huge problem due to the vastly higher compensation available there. This will only make things worse.
No because those brains increase the pool of inexpensive labour in the market, which will allow companies to avoid increasing salaries.
To be clear, this is a super hard problem and I'm not claiming limiting tech labour immigration is a panacea. It's not.
But unless this policy is paired with policies to increase local labour demand as well (which is the real hard problem), all this can do is drive down salaries while exacerbating the housing shortage, which is most acute in the markets where these workers are likely to settle (Vancouver, GTA, and Montreal).
This has been debated in the US ever since the H1B started. Does it suppress tech salaries or does it enable tech companies who are labor-limited to expand? Probably some of both. Still, many of these H1Bs in the US actually got their (higher) education here so letting them stay and apply that gained knowledge seems beneficial for the US economy. If they start moving to Canada they take that knowledge gained in the US with them and instead of building the economy here it contributes to building it there.
As of 2019, the US had a population of over half a million H1B. Maybe ten percent are top tier talent the US needs to import. I would argue the rest are simply taking jobs away from citizens.
> If they start moving to Canada they take that knowledge gained in the US with them and instead of building the economy here it contributes to building it there.
Which is why I say you have to pair this policy with policies to create local demand.
You've gotta give people a reason to build their business in Canada. Simply having a high quality labour pool isn't enough, especially now that remote work is so much more widely available.
Even basic things like getting funding is much harder in Canada because the center of mass is in SV.
But it's a super hard problem and few other places have cracked it (I'm looking at you, Stockholm!)
I'm a new tech immigrant worker to the US and I'm borderline tempted to qualify it as "cruel". I've lived in different countries so I'm familiar with immigration processes. The US has by far the most obtuse, difficult, involved and painful of all of them. And I say this as a Rest of World (ROW) worker, I know my Indian and Chinese colleagues have it much worse.
Yes yes I know, all of this is by design, there is plenty of demand, and they can get away with it. That doesn't detract from the fact that it is a crock of shit.
Good for Canada. There is a huge market for countries to attract talent simply by treating them humanly, specially as remote work makes people more mobile and wages more competitive.
What does Canada offer me as an American professional? In particular I enjoy living in my state with no sales/income tax and no restrictions on my gun hobby. Many of my generation would move to Canada solely as a political performance though I suppose.
You can enjoy your gun hobby. A lot of other people prefer their “ability to legally receive health care” and “not being targeted by the state for their identity” hobbies, and while imperfect Canada is certainly better than a lot of the US in that regard. People wanting to protect themselves isn’t political performance.
When I was living in Canada, my ex's family drove to the US for nearly 100% of medical screenings and 100% of dental work because waiting 6 months for an MRI or root canal when you're in debilitating pain is totally unreasonable.
It's better now, but now Canada also has shit like: "tired of waiting? try assisted suicide".
The US might have high standard costs but at least you have the option to pay for better than standard.
Waiting 6 months for a root canal sounds made up. While canada has some issues with wait times for some medical procedures, i have never in my life heard of a 6 month wait for a root canal.
> It's better now, but now Canada also has shit like: "tired of waiting? try assisted suicide".
Canada doesn't have that. That is based on a quote from some fired vetren affairs employee.
> But human rights advocates say the country’s regulations lack necessary safeguards, devalue the lives of disabled people and are prompting doctors and health workers to suggest the procedure to those who might not otherwise consider it.
> Equally troubling, advocates say, are instances in which people have sought to be killed because they weren’t getting adequate government support to live.
> Euthanasia “cannot be a default for Canada’s failure to fulfill its human rights obligations,” said Marie-Claude Landry, the head of its Human Rights Commission.
> Landry said she shares the “grave concern” voiced last year by three U.N. human rights experts, who wrote that Canada’s euthanasia law appeared to violate the agency’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They said the law had a “discriminatory impact” on disabled people and was inconsistent with Canada’s obligations to uphold international human rights standards.
> Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described Canada’s law as “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”
Both points are: going to happen at least once every so often no matter the system; and make good headlines due to the controversy and being unprovable (or undisprovable) by their nature.
> It's better now, but now Canada also has shit like: "tired of waiting? try assisted suicide".
This is a huge problem, and it's one of the reasons that I say Canada is definitely not a perfect solution. I agree with you here.
> The US might have high standard costs but at least you have the option to pay for better than standard.
For a lot of people this is becoming less true over time, depending on where you live. Today there are states where no amount of money can buy you a (legal) abortion, and states where no amount of money can get your child gender affirming care. Tomorrow traveling for that care might be a felony too.
It seems reasonable that if someone is in a position to move to Canada, they are probably in a position to move to California, New York, or some other safer state, but I understand why people might opt to leave the US altogether.
> and states where no amount of money can get your child gender affirming care. Tomorrow traveling for that care might be a felony too.
And that's a good thing. These people who advocate for the medical and surgical mutilation of children for gender fantasies have completely lost the plot. Cult mentality.
> and states where no amount of money can get your child gender affirming care. Tomorrow traveling for that care might be a felony too.
States that do allow your _child_ to get that kind of care are the outlier, not the norm and match the situation in most of the rest of the world. In most of the rest of the world there is an age requirement and usually it's at least 16 and parental consent is still required usually.
You are right, but a lot of states are like Florida for things like reproductive health care and LGBT rights. If someone is going to uproot their entire life to move someplace that is safer (and will almost certainly have a higher cost of living) it's not unreasonable that they choose another country. I'm not saying it's the only reasonable choice, just that there's a lot more to the rationale than political performance. Real people are having to make real decisions because of actual impacts to their lives. I think it's important to remind people of that.
These rules are targeted towards H1B visa holders in the US. Basically, if you are on an H1B (including if about to expire) you can immigrate to Canada (and bring your family) w/ no job offer needed.
The fact that you can sponsor your family (parents, etc) is huge.
You can still own many kinds of guns here in Canada, and roughly 5% of Canadians do.
There's certainly more requirements and limitations placed on you than you may be used to, put in place to ensure everyone else's right to safety isn't infringed upon. It's okay if you're not willing to abide by such restrictions, either by following them or by giving up your guns. That's totally your choice. It just means our country is not compatible with your chosen lifestyle.
As a canadian. I enjoy having people's gun hobbies restricted.
To each their own. Canada makes mildly different choices than the usa. If you like them great. If you don't, that is cool too, but maybe you shouldn't move here. There is nothing wrong with that, different people like different things.
The Canadian economy is fueled by rising real estate prices, price gouging/profiteering by a select few families, and wage suppression.
I'm not surprised the government is enticing 10k (and potentially more) tech workers who are running out of time on their H1-B to come to Canada.
I only hope these jobs are for skilled workers who already have a decade+ of experience and are specialists, otherwise we're going to have a lot of natural-born Canadians graduating college that will have next to no chance at finding entry-level work.
It's night and day. The U.S. economy is very diverse and sports a large proportion of medium-sized companies of all kinds. There's a huge gap in Canada where many of our medium-sized get snapped up by American investors who either move them to the U.S. or integrate them to their existing Canadian operations, torpedoing our chances at developing new large companies in the long term.
Let them poach. This is a short sighted prospect that will drive tech wages down, which are already lower in Canada than in the US. Of course, policies like this are meant to benefit business owners, not workers.
Canada will be a major beneficiary of climate change as the continent’s northern reaches warm. If they combine that with smart policy-making like this (i.e. increasing population while attracting industry), I think Canada could be a world superpower in 100 years.
Note: I’m not a highly informed person in this regard, but I think this is interesting to consider as a possibility
Our northern regions are rugged, heavily forested, undeveloped, and in the northernmost regions, experiencing loss of permafrost upon which communities and transportation corridors are built.
The southern parts of the country, where most people live, are increasingly experiencing record heat and drought that's straining our cities and threatening crop and grazing land, putting out food system at significant risk.
Maybe very long term northern countries can find a way to benefit from still being habitable, but by then the damage will have already been done.
There’s no doubt that climate change will negatively affect most countries in some way, but the question is: do you think Canada will fare better or worse relative to other countries?
I would wager that if future Montreal, for example, had winters more similar to today’s New York, far more people would want to live there.
I can only assume you've not been to either city if you think Montreal is that much worse or NYC that much better, in terms of year-round climate.
But more importantly, you can't increase your population if your cities have to ration the water or food supply because climate change has destroyed both. And mass migration is not going to happen without destroying lives and livelihoods.
I’ve lived in NY and have visited Montreal a bunch of times, including one unfortunate trip in January. The average high in January in NYC is almost 40 degrees, and it’s 25 degrees in Montreal. It is objectively much colder!
I think you are overestimating how much climate change will affect the food and water supply in North America. There will be huge problems but the apocalyptic idea you seem to have is more of a pop culture notion than a scientific one.
Being a super power is about a lot more than just temperature.
Look up videos on youtube that describe why US geography is overpowered and then see which of those reasons might apply to Canada if, say, sea levels rise and temperatures increase.
Other important factors: coastal access, number/size/depth of sea ports, current and future demographics, river systems, culture, natural resources, trade partners, military, economic system, access to nuclear weapons, military alliances, etc.
When you focus immigration policy on highly skilled migrants, which this policy is doing, you end up bringing more high paying jobs, so wages will increase. If the number of jobs were fixed, then yes, wages would decline, but second order agglomeration effects will increase the size of the pie.
Ok might not be zero, but I suspect getting visa wasn’t what was keeping them in the USA. It was rather trivial to get a Canadian residence permit. Still, they did worse than the US at attracting talent and there’s a reason for that.
It's nice to have the tech workers. But will the tech employers want to invest in a regulatory basket-case country?