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.
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.
Check out these two top threads thread at canadahousing subreddit:
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.
Housing is relatively affordable outside of Ontario and BC. Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns are all major metro areas where homes are less than half the price of the GTA and Vancouver metro.
The obvious fix for Ontario and BC to make housing more affordable is to allow people to build more where people want to live by relaxing zoning requirements. In 80%+ of Vancouver and 60%+ of Toronto it's literally illegal to build anything besides detached single family homes. Little of the remaining land zoned for more dense development is suitable for development. There are some smaller changes like streamlining permitting, not exempting 100% of capital gains and incentivizing speculation, and a vacancy tax to discourage speculation that would help. The problem is any changes to make housing more affordable are politically unpopular, almost 70% of Canadians are homeowners and in the short term benefit from the status quo. Also younger people are ~20% less likely to vote.
> Housing is relatively affordable outside of Ontario and BC. Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns are all major metro areas where homes are less than half the price of the GTA and Vancouver metro.
This is not the right way to think about it. Yes these cities are cheaper than GTA/GVA, but that has always been the case. And this metric only matters if you are earning GTA/GVA incomes and looking for something cheaper than these mega cities to buy in, which arguably only affects a tiny percent of the population.
The right comparison is how these cities’ house prices compare to themselves of 3, 5, 10 years ago versus their average household income over the same time periods.
When you look at that, which is a much more relevant metric of affordability, you will find there is essentially no city in this country that hasn’t been absolutely obliterated on affordability over the last decade.
7-10 years ago it was a GTA/GVA affordability issue. Now it a story of every podunk 2 horse town from coast to coast. Why? Because of interest rates! The BoC, like most central banks, left rates too low for too long and then massively overreacted to COVID.
Why would an immigrant care how much housing prices were in a city 3, 5, or 10 years ago? That has absolutely nothing to do with how affordable it is right now.
Issue is not just housing. Our health services and infra is crumbling. 401 near Yonge st is jammed nearly 24 hours (yes!!!). We literally have no more space for cars. We have switch to the 407 for as much travel as we can (and it is crazy expensive and silly given how much tax I pay as a techie).
The ERs in GTA are just always clogged. I've had to deal with multiple instances of 10+ hour waits in the ER. When they were not addressed in time, one such incident got worse, and ended up in a 10 day serious hospital stay (love the logic on that one).
Getting an appointment with any sort of specialist is also a gauntlet.
I'm an immigrant and it was surreal hearing the new Toronto mayor talk about how much she accomplished as an immigrant to Canada. It was indeed possible when she and I came to this country. It is a fantasy today. GTA has become a terrible place to live in a very short time period.
Immigration is a double edged swords. It's one way to grow an economy rapidly, but you can't really do it without proper 10-20 year ahead planning. Not a real surprise, since most politicians are concerned with short term wins.
> Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns
Yeah, all of these cities also have long, harsh winters.
FWIW I'm a Canadian who lived in California on work visas for several years and relocated to Australia in 2011, where I'm now a citizen. I've never regretted leaving Canada.
Banana belt, what on earth are you taking about? Hogtown sure. Maybe even “the big smoke”, and not because of the current wildfires. But banana belt? First time I’ve heard it
> "The 'banana belt' or Carolinian Canada is a region in Ontario found south of a line which runs approximately from Grand Bend to Toronto." -- http://erintown.blogspot.com/
Canadian here, lived in Toronto for about a decade.
There are many names that Canadians from outside Toronto call Toronto...few repeatable in polite company...but I have never heard this Banana Belt term either.
Not compared to most places in Canada its not. Toronto I would say is between 2C to -10C on average during the winter, -20C in the extreme. Cities like Regina and Saskatoon for example have winters in the range of -20C to -40C on average, and extremes can reach -55C. Its like comparing Alaska and NYC.
Price has also been going up in the cities you called “relatively affordable”
I live in the middle of nowhere and when renewing my annual lease my rent went 10% up
It is expensive for most people who live here
And Calgary prices have shooted up due to people leaving BC and ON. Not as expensive as BC or ON but nevertheless local people are feeling the changes.
I live in Montreal and prices for new condos are nearly 1M, rent has been steadily increasing and wages are pretty low.
To make matters worse, enjoy not having any road infrastructure, dealing with construction and traffic, paying the highest tax in country and dealing with an incompetent government who is more concerned about replacing stop signs that say "STOP" with "ARRÊT" instead of focusing on healthcare, education and employment.
I'm not sure why everyone thinks we live in a paradise. Montreal is only "hip" if you are 18 and want to go clubbing at night. The allure of "Jazz Fest" drops off quickly.
> The obvious fix for Ontario and BC to make housing more affordable is to allow people to build more where people want to live by relaxing zoning requirements.
The market has proven totally unable to solve the housing crisis and your solution is to relax regulation and incentivize builders to make more profits. The price of units and homes is already too high, incentives will just get us more market rate or above housing.
Here's another option: start to decommodify housing by building good, mixed income public housing. Vienna and Singapore have two different models that could work here.
Billboards have run before (“Can’t afford a home? Have you tried having rich parents?”, etc). A protest was organized but very few showed up. None of this work when the ruling class is benefiting from the lack of housing.
You need something more attention grabbing. Something Titan-like that the media will run with for days. Something like what started the Arab spring or similar movements. Not advocating for self-immolation, but it has to be dramatic enough to wake people up.
There are too many incumbents benefiting from the status quo that it’ll take a monumental effort to turn things around.
If the primary issue is the wealthy controlling housing then why is the brand new Toronto mayor, a representative of the working class party (NDP), have zero stuff about reforming housing policy like zoning and height limits, or anything about anti-NIMBYism? Basically the stuff that's very obviously been holding back development forever.
Chow would probably be at the front of any Arab Spring type protest in Toronto championing housing.
Yet her whole website is the same shit we've been sold as solutions since the 1970s: city wide rent control that has repeatedly resulted in a long term reduction in housing supply, a small set of new gov built skyscrapers that will take a decade to build and come in at twice the cost of budget, doubling down on disincentivizing renting properties by 2xing the amount of legal worries property renters have to go through when dealing with bad tenants, some weak stuff about city spending $100M to buy homes off the market so they don't get renovated (so basically 10 homes), etc, etc.
Is the NDP the party of the wealthy elite in Toronto? Over valuing protecting a small amount of exclusive neighbourhoods with old Victorian homes at the expense of the rest of the (very large and varied) city and only ever allowing expensive skyscrapers to be built?
The answer to that might be yes. But it's hard to disconnect those critiques from the language and policies of municipal politics here in Toronto... and almost every major western city. Which always sounds the same, while conventiently blaming someone else.
> If the primary issue is the wealthy controlling housing then why is the brand new Toronto mayor, a representative of the working class party (NDP), have zero stuff about reforming housing policy like zoning and height limits, or anything about anti-NIMBYism? Basically the stuff that's very obviously been holding back development forever.
I have no idea what you're complaining about. All of the policies you want are what she is promising. And has done.
She made it so that you can now build four story, four unit multiplexes. It's right there on the website you linked. This already happened a few months ago.
And she says "Olivia would streamline, coordinate and simplify the approval process for housing so we can get more built, faster."
And she wants to put a wealth tax on those expensive homes you don't like.
You can complain that the city could move faster. But, all of the things you want are what she is doing.
> Olivia would streamline, coordinate and simplify the approval process for housing so we can get more built, faster
Those are generic sentences without substance. Of course the city wants to be efficient. But unless I hear specifics I'm extremely skeptical.
> She made it so that you can now build four story, four unit multiplexes
Good, but city approval for heights is probably the most boring and lowest hanging of my complaints. Zoning reform and NIMBYism is 90% of what reduces supply and kills off meaningful development.
This is a multi-decade crisis, it's not a minor policy debate in city council.
Even if they can get approval for a 4 story multiplex the fact 90% are building skyscrapers instead of other (legal) arrangements happen because it's the only one people are willing to risk $$$ on. It's extremely risky to run a development project in the city, because a) where you can build is severely capped so you have to build as high as possible and b) if you're going to navigate all of roadblocks and NIMBY backed lawyering you better be getting a property who's ROI can fund teams of lawyers and support years of development, often well before any construction start.
If we actually want to solve the housing crisis we literally need to start razing whole blocks of single family homes, industrial areas, old office buildings, etc and build high density housing.
This is radical stuff. Nothing about what Chow is proposing is anywhere close to addressing the crisis.
Four unit multiplexes is a joke. No city with a population above 100k should have any restriction on height or density of any kind. With the cost of acquiring a house and the permitting BS, I'm sure very few of these multiplexes will be profitable to build.
Why would you expect anything different? Left-NIMBYism is a real - and unfortunate - thing, especially among older members of the left, and Chow's been in politics for 30 years.
I'm a pretty boring social democrat in most regards, so saying this as someone who generally holds fairly leftist views on many things: the leftist ideology, very roughly speaking, believes that government intervention results in better results for the common man than a capitalist market left to its own devices; this gestures directly towards price controls, zoning laws, every kind of regulation, and socialized housing. Leftists are deeply skeptical of market-based solutions; even basic economic principles like supply-and-demand are viewed with skepticism by association with Economics as a field, which tends to be viewed (not totally or necessarily wrongly) as a false science that's more of an ideological tool of capitalists than anything. They view profit-making and companies that seek to make profit - like developers - as fundamentally impure and in need of reining in. And because of decades of urban sprawl in North America, they associate development with environmental destruction, even though, ironically, one important way we could help save the environment is by densifying the hell out of our cities. And don't get me started on fears of gentrification - although there we're beginning to blur the line between "progressives" and leftists, but those lines are already pretty blurred.
I know enough left-NIMBYs to know that their intentions are pure - it's not a case of ladder-kickers. Just a particularly bad strain of thought that's - like you said - pretty widespread in municipal politics. Probably because NIMBYism transcends ideology in a way - there's different kinds of NIMBYism across the spectrum, always with the same outcome, and many voters will happily cross party lines to keep their neighbourhood just the way it is, thank you very much.
Happily, in my experience younger urbanists - even the left-wing ones - tend to (though don't always) recognize the excesses of left-NIMBYism.
I suppose I should've said they not intentional ladder-kickers; quite the opposite: they genuinely believe that their policies, and only their policies, will actually lead to more affordable housing.
This is in comparison to more conventional NIMBYs, who don't really care - they feel entitled to "preserve neighbourhood character", say things like "city's full, don't move here", that sort of thing.
People are living longer and healthier and more independantly, which means they want to stay in their city homes in their 60s - 80s. What do you want to do, put them in warehouses? Plus there is a lot of immigration, but we need that.
There is an ongoing process of densification, it can be faster but it can't be done too quickly, it's not fair to blot out people's views or destroy neighbourhoods or destroy every remnant of past eras.
With these dynamics it's no surprise that city housing is so expensive, and I don't think it comes down to one factor like interest rates or greedy people, so that billboard is just political pandering. What would your attention-getting measure ask for?
I get the impression a lot of people are complaining they can't afford a family home basically in a prime-ish city location. Can't blame them for wanting that, but an option could be to move outside the cities. Properties are quite affordable, and there are some good transit corridors and decent towns (and advantages of living in the country), though better commuting options will always be welcome.
This is what I've done, an hour outside a city, I'm on a forested acre with a lake, with beautiful views year-round. I'm far from house poor so I can afford to travel all winter or do overnights in any city.
To enable this, I would push for better commuting, with more hubs and extended service so it's super easy to get to downtowns. But resolving scarcity of talent in the trades would also be key.
I've seen first hand refugees come to Canada from Ukraine, realize that this country is in their words "not a country where you can have an easy life" and within 6 months figure out a way to get to the states.
I could've been making a great salary in Canada as a new grad but it just didn't make sense to stay when I could make 1.5x more in the US (and in USD!).
Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like this person is assuming all software developers are (military age) men. I'm not aware of other restrictions on people being able to leave Ukraine.
Quite a lot of folks in Ukraine aren't exactly known for strictly complying with every regulation. There's undoubtedly a huge number of military age men that left regardless, especially among software devs.
Yes, home prices are drastically lower in most of the states than in Canada. Taxes are also lower, and pay is higher. Just compare home prices in Niagara Falls New York, where you can get what Canadians would consider a great house for literally 100k, and Niagara Falls Ontario where you're looking at 600k-900k. Or compare White Rock BC where a house will run you 3 million, to Blaine Washington where you can get a house for 300k.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Probably there are many people who take the opposite route, states first then Canada. I only know a few cases though.
As Canada gets more young citizens without building, their home ownership has continued plummeting. [1]
Once there is a critical mass of single-issue pro-housing voters, we can expect to see a huge tsunami of pro-housing bills get passed for this politically lucrative issue.
As of now, old homeowners are the electoral majority. So, pro-housing politics is a losing strategy. But you can only sustain it so long in a nation with at ton of younger owned-home-started immigrants.
To add to my reply, it appears that - rather than "plummeting" since 2011 - homeownership went up even more recently and actually peaked in 2019:
> About two in three Canadians lived in an owner-occupied home in 2022. Since 2017, the home ownership rate in Canada has fluctuated and in 2019, it peaked at approximately 68.6 percent. In 2022, this figure was slightly lower, at 66.5 percent.
2/3 of Canadians living in a home their family owns is still far from a situation where a critical mass of voters are demanding pro-renter housing policies.
Even those living at home with parents will be benefiting from the status quo when they eventually inherit their parent's property.
Canada is acute, but this is the same issue in many countries right now. The older, voting generation has voted, every time, to maximise their personal wellbeing at the expense of the younger generations. Because they comprise such a large voting bloc, and they're diligent voters, and they can buy political influence, policies remain catered towards them. I agree that the only solution here is through democracy, and that means demographic changes. In the next 1-2 decades, home owners will be in the minority in many countries. That's when things will get very interesting, politically. In New Zealand, for example, the younger, disenfranchised demographics have been chewed up and spat on their entire lives. We're talking everyone born after 1980. They harbour hate. The political swings are going to be wild. I think there will be enormous land value taxes levied.
I don't think so, but democracy is actually pretty new. It wasn't until the 60s in America where one could confidently argue that every man and woman could vote without major impediment. In 1920 women are guaranteed the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment. There was also a lot of war happening.
So could previous generations have done the same? Their generation just wasn't large enough. Then along came this crazy baby boom and suddenly there was this all-powerful voting bloc which has shaped the world.
No, previous generations tended to preserve the social contract of not fucking over their grandkids so they could go out to eat more and take more vacations in retirement.
Before they were called boomers they were called "generation me". It should hardly be a surprise that this is what generation me would do in old age.
Your chart shows home ownership recently peaked at 69% in 2011.
The current 66% is (a) not that big a change and (b) still high compared to historical averages so it's not so much "plummeting" as it is "reverting to the mean".
(which means we'll just continue to uphold the status quo like we always have)
Another part of the problem is that those who down own but rent have seen rents increase (in many but perhaps not all of the major cities) to the highest proportion of income in history and often are as high as a mortgage payment. So now there’s no real savings to be had by renting, and no ability to save to get into the housing market later (prices in some markets were increasing on average by tens of thousands of dollars per month through COVID - galloping away from even the most diligently saving renter trying to get to a down payment. So it seems there’s an owner class and a renter class, and both are financially strapped, and it is near impossible to move from renter to owner.
This is a direct result of insufficient supply and skyrocketing values (thanks to interest rates being too low for too long).
There are 2k+ houses for sale in Nova Scotia under 200k right now. Canada is more than the GTA area. Actually as I know the same thing happened in the US at the turn of the century. People arriving to the country finding prices high in New York ventured further, settling in Ohio, for example. Ohio has the highest hungarian population out of all states, due to this.
People always adapt, and overcome. It's really not up to the "state" to solve middle-class housing issues. It's not the soviet union.
In defense of the Soviet Union, these zoning laws don't come from there. They come from the US, as an effort in the early 20th century to keep undesirable people (jews, blacks, chinese, etc.) away from precious whites.
True, and I didn't mean to imply that Euclidean zoning was invented by the Soviets. Rather, the Soviets, having a planned economy and authoritarian system, planned urban development: they decided how housing would be built, where, and what type. Their choice gave them big apartment blocks, but it was because the State mandated this, not because any developers or private landowners wanted them.
In the US and Canada, it's very similar, though a bit different: the State has decided that only ridiculously inefficient single-family housing is allowed to be built.
Both of them are situations where the State has forced limits on what kind of housing is allowed, but the type of housing is obviously diametrically different. A better system is one where the State sets very few limits on housing, only very practical ones (no 50-story towers next to the airport, for instance), and lets landowners do what they want with their land, within reason.
Thr job market, and for that matter the internet quality, in most of those Nova Scotian locations is not going to support anything except the kindest full-remote position. Those houses are for sale at that rate because they were too bad to get swept up in the wave of transplants the province has been seeing basically since the pandemic started.
My family purchased a home in the province in 2007 for less than 100k. We had to repair the foundation and roof of our house multiple times, and the previous owner used seven layers of wallpaper instead of installing insulation. Cheap homes have their own problems, and two pensions was the only reason we could afford to fix it.
$260k for a multifamily home is pretty reasonable, in my books. The eternal issue though, is convincing new Canadians that there exists a life outside of the GTA and Vancouver.
It sounds fine in theory but leaving Vancouver to go to St John's for affordable housing is not really an option for any one with family here. I may as well go to Thailand for affordable housing, it is more affordable and flights are the same price. People have obligations with family and they want to be close to their friends.
It's not like Europe where you can do 60 minutes from a big city and prices fall off a cliff. In bc you have to go four hours drive from Vancouver to find cheapish housing (Hope it's the spot) and that's not a commutable distance. The complete lack of public transport makes it worse but the sheer scale of it is the biggest problem.
If I was going to start again there is no way I would choose Vancouver but people get stuck in cities for many reasons but the biggest one is either relationship commitments or where the work is.
I always heard such good things about Quebec City. Quality of life looks excellent. Thanks for sharing the housing price update. It sounds pretty good. As I recall, there are a bunch of good tech jobs there also due to UniSoft and friends.
Given that Edmonton's population is 26% immigrants, that's simply false. The main problem is that these cities are very small, so even though as a percentage they absorb a lot of immigrants, they can't make that much of a dent overall.
This is the more controversial opinion, so it would be on you to list those cities.
Many places don't necessarily have expensive housing in absolute dollars for someone making top money, but that doesn't mean they don't have housing issues
Sudbury, North Bay, Sault St Marie, Quebec City, St. John's, Cornwall, Timmins... The list goes on.
All are safe, welcoming cities, all are relatively affordable. No they don't have an NHL team, yes they get cold in the winter. This is a cold country!
With maybe the exception of Quebec City and St Johns which I'd like to visit, not to disparage those cities, but they are... small, extremely isolated, and yes cold but I think that's the least of the issue, and I say that being from Winnipeg.
The cold is a real issue, but it's an extreme issue if you have the other two qualities, all 3 present in Winnipeg too because it's like 9 hours from any other city over 300k. I remember bussing to school every day, and walking one block would make my face feel like it was on fire, then I'd get home later and it would be dark, nobody really wants to do much except drink because there isn't much else. Sprawl and the same terrible zoning as anywhere else made it so only copy/pasted franchises would go up in the commercial areas, always along a major roadway with giant parking lots. I revisit once or twice a year, and it's deeply upsetting.
I pass through many towns like North Bay on road trips, and I have nothing against them inherently, but I think they're only suitable for the same people who just have no interest in being around many other people and bailed from Toronto as soon as their work went remote (I don't personally care for TO as much as Van). That, or people who just literally need any place to set up shop and support a family, but it's crazy to me that the major cities are essentially saying to a majority of young people who are renting their basement suites and have been for a decade, "It's cute that you want to stay where you've already built your community, but we own this and you get to pay my mortgage"
Billboards are your plan? 70% of Canadians are happy with the situation. Even more of those who actually vote.
If this was actually a problem then it would have been solved. It's not that hard to build houses.
Personally I'd like to buy a house and convert it to an unreasonable number of apartments with a common kitchen. If you happen to hookup a kitchen in your apartment how would I know?
That ratio is declining by the day as more and more join the renting class. Olivia Chow’s victory in Toronto is testament to that. She ran on increasing the vacancy tax, making evictions more difficult, building 25k rental homes, etc. No wonder why the old guard like Ford and Tory tried everything to steer people away from her. But she still won. Speaks volumes of the changes in the demographics. It’s no longer 70% that are happy with the housing crisis I can tell you this much.
You assume all homeowners are happy with the situation. That is definitely not the case. Many looking to upsize or thinking about housing for their kids are not pleased with the rising prices. And this crowd is growing too.
That doesn't really capture it though. Anyone who lives in a home which is occupied by the owner counts in this figure. So if someone in their 20s is unable to afford to live on their own and has to live with their parents, they will count towards this homeowner statistic.
I already bought a home (it is a starter home) and it is nice seeing my home price increase but I can never upgrade (well .. I can but it would be financial suicide to). I think some Canadian home owners get that but your point is actually totally valid. The Home Affordability issue just targets renters.
I think the right billboard should cover our shit roads and transit, and our healthcare/ER. That affects everyone (and seniors the most!)
In better accommodations than the "berry picking talent", "retail talent", "warehouse talent" or "trucking talent" that was fashionable to bring in in previous years.
>government expects free market will solve the housing
I nearly choked on my milk reading this. When in the recent period has housing ever followed the rules of supply and demand? The government policy makers, nimbys and banks are constantly doing everything possible to prevent the bubble from popping and to limit supply to ensure thier nest eggs keep appreciating regardless.
If housing actually had liberated free market, without government or nimby interference, we wouldn't have a housing crisis.
Same in Europe. Nobody wants the unsustainable housing bubble to pop, because everyone , from the voters to policy makers, are heavily invested into it with the idea that it must always go up no matter what. We've basically chosen going full steam ahead towards the iceberg because "line must go up".
I have tried to get into Canada as a FAANG engineer through internal transfer from within the company. The pay was hilarious compared to what I would have gotten in the US, but I had personal reasons to choose Canada instead.
It has been a total shitshow. I started the process in June of 2022, eventually the team I was moving to got bored of waiting for the work permit in March 2023.
Factoring out the (ridiculous) 3 months it took for the relocation agency to prepare and submit my work permit application, it was six months of waiting with no feedback at all from the IRCC about where the process is stuck. All inquiries went unanswered.
Once I lost the position, I emailed the local Canadian embassy to let them know my thoughts, I was (expectedly) greeted back with an automated email saying that emails about immigration will not be looked at.
All in all, the processes in Canada are very immature and if you value predictability and stability in your life, do not attempt to get a job there.
> was six months of waiting with no feedback at all from the IRCC about where the process is stuck.
Since most governments went WFH, application processes for everything have, in my experience, gone to insane lengths. I don’t think the government union culture and WFH mixed well.
That’s great, but have you tried interacting with government to confirm yourself? It is unbelievable how long it takes to deal with CRA these days, or get a building permit for something as simple as a deck returned. Wait times are massively longer than they were pre-COVID.
> It has been a total shitshow. I started the process in June of 2022, eventually the team I was moving to got bored of waiting for the work permit in March 2023.
Someone did something very wrong. The wait time for a temporary work permit from the US is a whole 5 weeks.
I've done this, the process was very transparent and predictable.
That was my impression as well until my first-hand experience. In comparison, a colleague started the transfer process to the US 2 months after I started with Canada and left to the US in 2 months after that.
It has not been a good experience with me and has soured my impression of Canada tremendously.
Well most immigrants into Canada aren't coming from US so the wait times are small. Tech immigrants mostly come from India and China, where the waiting times range from 3 months atleast upto a year and a half.
The Canadian immigration policy is not what's on paper, really it's determined by funding. IRCC is understaffed and recently went on strike over pay and stuff. The funding level is giving the Canadian government a way to eat their cake and have it, too. Write a liberal immigration policy on paper, limit immigration by not having staff to process all the paperwork.
> Factoring out the (ridiculous) 3 months it took for the relocation agency to prepare and submit my work permit application
Taking that long, brings into mind the possibility that you used an incompetent agency. Thus, maybe they also filled the actual application badly, and then the Canadian authorities had problems interpreting and processing your application.
Maybe this all can be explained by an incompetent agency, and not faults in the actual Canadian system.
I have a lot of bad things to say about my experience with that agency indeed.
However, this doesn’t excuse never answering official inquiries and being wholly uncooperative. And even a rejection would have been better than the radio silence and apathy I have experienced.
I'm currently trying to migrate from Germany to Canada. It appears to me that the job market in Canada is horrible at the moment.
I have 8YoE in Cloud and quite in demand in Germany(recently got a good offer, which i'm considering, from a German company purely because of my open source contributions, also passed HC in one of FAANGs, but stuck in team match phase due to layoffs). I sent 10s of applications(it's hard to send 100s as i'm highly specialized) and didn't get a single interview from that.
Speaking as a Canadian who has spent most of his adult working life outside of Canada, the Canadian job market for anything STEM has always been pretty poor.
One of the main problems people have with this is “housing costs “, what’s causing the housing problem there. Surely its not just the immigrants that are to blame . Canada has swaths of land, it definitely does not have a space issue. It has plenty of resources (major economic driver is natural resources) , no resource issues either . What exactly is causing the housing price to stay so high compared to income .
It's zoning which forbids the construction of any denser forms of housing than single-family detached houses in the vast majority (like, ~90%) of the land in most Canadian cities. And more broadly an insane amount of bureaucracy and friction that developers have to go through in order to get a building approved. In Vancouver, they are literally tearing down apartment buildings and replacing them with multi-million dollar mansions, within walking distance to downtown, because it's no longer permitted to build apartments in the neighbourhood and the buildings are end-of-life. Check this map here, all the yellow areas are zoned for houses (luxury mansions in this market) only https://maps.vancouver.ca/zoning/.
This (https://www.google.com/maps/@49.2632824,-123.0709435,3a,82.3...) is across the street from Commercial-Broadway station, the busiest skytrain station in Metro Vancouver at the intersection of the two major lines. The lines were constructed in 1986 and 2002 so they've had a good 37 years to densify the area. It's the same story in every city outside of Montreal and Quebec City.
Then there's the many ways that Canadian homeowners benefit at the expense of everyone else from subsidies. Unlike in the US, capital gains on primary residences in Canada are completely tax free with no limit. That incentivizes people to invest as much as possible into buying as much home as they can. Then, in some jurisdictions like Ontario and BC, owner-occupied homes are actually charged less property taxes. In other words, renters are subsidizing homeowners. Then, in some provinces like in BC, you can actually apply to defer paying property taxes entirely until you're dead at which point the estate pays the balance. Further, homeowners with a home worth less than about 2.125 million, and you are 65 or older, you are eligible for a grant of $1045 per month discount on your property taxes simply for being a poor downtrodden homeowner. Being a homeowner also gives you the right to vote in every municipality that you own property in. So we have a municipal politics in which property owners are given more of a voice than residents themselves. Absolutely fucking disgusting
> Then, in some jurisdictions like Ontario and BC, owner-occupied homes are actually charged less property taxes. In other words, renters are subsidizing homeowners.
I’ve owned in both and I am not sure what you are referring to. Residential mill rates don’t seem to distinguish between owner occupied and not. The only thing I can think of that resembles what you are talking about is the extra tax on vacant homes or extra tax in some municipalities on secondary homes?
> Then, in some provinces like in BC, you can actually apply to defer paying property taxes entirely until you're dead at which point the estate pays the balance.
There’s interest that applies too right? It is essentially a loan from the municipality and I think it also gets paid if you sell before death. I agree that it is totally bizarre that BC offers this.
> Further, homeowners with a home worth less than about 2.125 million, and you are 65 or older, you are eligible for a grant of $1045 per month discount on your property taxes simply for being a poor downtrodden homeowner.
Yup, this is ludicrous and a self-serving item by and for boomers. I think this is per year though - not per month.
In Hamilton, purpose built rental apartment buildings have a way higher mill rate than condo buildings (even when individual units are rented out) or single family houses. Tyranny of the single family homeowner majority.
Which part are you saying isn't true? It most certainly is. In Canada, the capital gains exemption on principal residences has no limit. In the states, you start paying capital gains after 250k or 500k, depending on whether you are single or married. I think you can roll your gains above that into a new mortgage to avoid or delay paying the taxes, but I don't know the details.
No, the land immediately surrounding the urban area of Toronto is some of the most fertile and productive farmland on Earth, the really cheap land is several hours drive north and almost entirely rock/muskeg/etc. and much colder.
Without having numbers, we'd just be armchair economists. But there are a number of things we could look for.
- Everyone wants to live in the same places. From what I understand, Toronto is the elephant in the room in Canada. It's the #1 and almost everyone wants to live there. Also, most of Canada's farmland is below the 49th parallel. Next up are Vancouver and Montreal. Vancouver is hemmed in by mountains and floodplains so you can't just build everywhere. There may be a local version of this as well.
- Plain old demand outstrips supply. Y'all are building housing like crazy in Vancouver, compared to the Bay Area, but folks who've lived there a while tell me that the place was discovered after the Olympics. Someone else mentioned zoning, which may work with this point and the previous point, but we don't know.
- The business / investor class is relatively static. In the naughts, there was this idea that software developers should not be paid more than X, and that the only way to move up was to become a manager. Despite that, salaries crept up because of competition from finance, until the collusion between Jobs and others was exposed. Is there some wider version of this in society? I don't know. In Oregon, non-competes only apply to people up to a certain level of income, so this sort of thing may be subtle.
- Property taxes are low but income taxes are high. This would favor investing in real estate rather than the labor market.
- Immigration for skilled labor is difficult. This would depress average incomes, especially if the immigrants you are losing are the sort who tend to use more services.
- Infrastructure / building costs are expensive, e.g. if the cost of infrastructure is subsidized through housing any way. Canada's topography is not as blessed as the U.S. It is not lacking for resources, but the only region of Canada where it's easy to transport said resources, without significant capital investment, is in the Toronto area. In the U.S., if you want to ship grain, you just float it down the river. That's super cheap. And then how do you get it to population centers? Most of Canada is big and spread out, and the rivers run north in many parts too. I imagine that in a lot of it, you have to build roads, and it's hard to build roads to all of the places. This restricts the actual amount of land that's available for settlement.
So yeah, someone with a LOT of time and experience doing econometrics could go and quantify these and other things, if the data is there. They may need to gather data themselves.
Plan is to increase our population by about 500k per year(I think about 200K natural growth & 300K immigration).
We already have a housing shortage. They created a 10bil housing fund. Plan is for this fund to... invest in the stock market, and use the interest to fund the construction of 6000 houses a year.
It's a fucking joke.
People talk about Big Australia(govt policy of sharply increasing population) for geopolitical reasons, but I think it's simpler than that. My personal theory is that the govt doesn't want to go into a technical recession and be excoriated in the murdoch press as bad economic managers because they were left holding the previous govts turd sandwich.
The parallels between Australia & Canada are interesting, but i'm curious why the Canadian govt is motivated to do this...
The Common (un)Wealth. The society they've built is self extinguishing. Birth rates from immigrants fall off and become part of the status quo in a generation.
The numbers aren't correct. Australia has a declining population excl. migration, so perhaps your domestic figure doesn't include deaths.
Permanent visa quotas are indexed as a percentage of population since 15-20 years ago, and it was reduced this year for the first time in ages be 5k less (195->190).
Net overseas migration is commonly touted but that includes citizens/students etc and is just that years entrants - departures: highly affected by recent global disruptions during covid.
Statistics in this release are commonly known as Estimated Resident Population (ERP).
Australia’s population was 26,268,359 people at 31 December 2022.
The quarterly growth was 127,078 people (0.5%).
The annual growth was 496,800 people (1.9%).
Annual natural increase was 109,800 and net overseas migration was 387,000.
It's exploitation only if you put the immigrants into a disadvantageous position like the US did with their H2B visa which essentially enslaves them to their employers.
When the immigrants have equal rights and they get the job, that's a fair meritocracy. Immigrants don't automatically like getting paid less or work in a toxic environment or live in a shitty house, they endure it due to the restrictions on their rights to move and work. In other word, Immigrants are not people who don't know better.
When you limit the immigration, that's like the taxi medallion system which creates a fake shortage which benefits only the medallion holders. You end up with shitty taxis.
There's nothing wrong to be paid fair market wage. I wish we can just abolish this medallion system altogether, people shouldn't be asking for permission to work and travel. This must be an universal human right.
The commenter doesn't seem to be against immigration, but aggressive immigration which is more like encouraging people to move somewhere without creating natural demand through creating jobs and industry. Canada is hardly producing enough jobs to justify this level of immigration, factoring in unintended immigration though marriages and children, you will be looking at grim situation if root causes of today are not solved properly.
It's all stat juking. They can write bigger budgets because they are allowed to assume $x per immigrant in the economic plans, so increasing immigration means more budget funds.
The problem is that that assumption is highly dependent on who is immigrating. A highly educated healthy person will make a net contribution, others will cost the government and the governments will turn to subsidizing their employment in the private sector to reduce the cost. This becomes wage lowering pressure. Businesses that rely on mass labor get a government subsidized labor force that keeps their local labor in check.
Yup. it's definitely intended. They do everything to cause this issue. it's like the one thing they can repeat over and over again. it's their MO. they want a weakened country and poor citizens
I don't expect a lot of people to take this up. Express Entry was already an option for these folks and you get permanent residency from the start under that program.
The exception case is those of us without degrees: Express Entry is a non-starter without a degree unless you go through a provincial nomination program that's willing to also overlook the lack of degree (AFAIK the BC Tech Pilot may be the only relevant example to us software folk). The Global Talent Stream visas are (to my knowledge) the only skilled worker visas in Canada that don't require degrees, and thus are what I used for the year or so I lived in Canada. I suspect this new open work permit scheme will resolve the lone issue GTS visas had for such workers: that if the job didn't work out, as mine didn't, you have to (1) flagpole, or (2) go home (which is what I did).
So, yeah, probably still relatively low takeup, but it's going to solve a corner case that, if I had the energy or interest to move back to Canada (which unfortunately seems to have suffered lots of the same issues the US has in the past several years, just in differing flavors at times), I'd be thankful to have solved.
Express entry also penalizes those of us who are a bit older. Kind of sucks, because I don't think I really hit my stride as a dev until I was around 35.
At least Singapore explicitly has in their Visa requirements that founding and selling a company is equivalent to a high level degree for their work visa requirements.
So many of these "talent" visa's don't look at talent at all.
People compare Canada with US. But don’t forget the situation is worse in Europe, and many parts of the world (low salaries, high taxes, expensive housing, inflation and unemployment, bureaucracy and inefficiency, crime and safety problems, general dysfunction etc). Canada is great in many respects.
I tried to immigrate to Canada, from Europe, some 8 years ago. Degree in CS, many years of experience under my belt. Even had a remote senior developer job and was looking into using a dual taxation law that my country has with them, so that I could pay my taxes in Canada.
Took the language tests and got a ~95%. Then just hit a wall. Needed points (in their point based application process) to progress my application. And I would have gotten plenty of those if I had quit my high paying tech job to become a store clerk.
At that point I decided this was just silly, packed my suitcases and went back home.
Sounds like the Soviet Union. Store clerks, factory workers and other working-class people were of the "desirable" background and had extra points when e.g. their children applied to universities.
> This measure will remain in effect for one year, or until Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) receives 10,000 applications. Only principal applicants, and not their accompanying family members, will count toward the application cap.
Only 10,000 people? Sounds like a good, but quickly fading opportunity.
Curious where the growth is. I’m assuming in cities. And I’m assuming that “90% of Canadians live within 90 miles of the US border” more than ever. I want my assumptions to be incorrect. But I worry they are not.
>As of June 16, 2023, there are now 40 million Canadians! This is a historic milestone for Canada and certainly cause for celebration. It is also a great opportunity to look back on the country's growth over the years, and to reflect on the future.
This is not for applicants I think. Only those with an H1B approved visa. The ones who have an approved H1B but no job in the US would move to Canada. So they are not targeting those who have a job in US ( they have little to no incentive to move any way).
Usual incompetence from Ottawa again and again.
There hasn't been a shortage of applicants since at least 2019. Recently had to fill two roles and out of more than 70 candidates we hired none and transferred two people from other teams. Lots of people pretending to have the required skills who can't answer basic questions and people with unrealistic salary expectations.
As someone who has hired software developers in Canada and looked into opening an office there in a previous role, I'll tell you that taxes are prohibitive both for employers and employees. With the US this close it's often cheaper and easier for everyone involved to deal with the US immigration process and pay and employee's moving expenses than it is to try and set up a Canadian headquarters or hire workers there.
This is true on a state by state basis in the US as well. Hawaii is a nightmare to hire workers in, so much so that our HR put their foot down and told me they're not supporting it anymore. Meanwhile hiring someone in Washington, Texas, or Florida is a breeze.
I pulled out of Mexico in my current role and moved those jobs to Chile, Brazil, and the Balkans. The reason had nothing to do with the talent of the engineers in Mexico and everything to do with how painful it is to deal with their government.
If Canada wants high paying tech jobs there is a very straight-forward way for them to get them: make their government bureaucracy more efficient and pass those savings on to your citizens.
Canadian tech employers pay some of the lowest effective income tax rates in any developed country because the R&D tax credit regime is so generous. For Canadian controlled private corporations, the tax credit on R&D salaries is about 60%, making a $200K engineer cost just $80K after tax.
That engineer, if located in Vancouver, will pay $69K in income taxes. The same person working in San Francisco would pay $67K. But the San Francisco employer doesn’t get a tax credit of $120K and they also have to pay perhaps $12,000 or more per year in healthcare premiums.
Canada has its flaws. Ultimately the country is subsidized by resource revenues, leading to distortions. But the USA has the military industrial complex. Pick your poison. I think Canada is a healthier democracy and a better place to raise your kids.
That's true but the regulations and taxes on corporate entities are quite significant in Canada once it gets past start-up size.
For an office of a few hundred people, large enough to not qualify for most of the cost and paperwork reducing programs, it is likely not nearly as clear-cut.
I’m not sure what these regulations and taxes are that you’re talking about. Have you looked at Alberta? It’s the Texas of Canada. Extremely lightweight corporate regulation and low taxes. Corporate income tax on the first $500,000 of income is just 11%. On the rest it is 23%.
The US federal corporate tax rate is 21%, after which states impose a variety of taxes.
California adds 8.84%. Texas and Washington tax gross receipts rather than net income, so it’s hard to make a direct comparison. But overall, corporate taxes in Canada are considered low by international standards.
As for business regulation, the reality for a tech business is that you rarely cross any regulatory boundaries. Employment law is straightforward. You can fire people easily. There aren’t tons of hidden costs. A little bit is spent on healthcare (1.5% in BC, zero in most other provinces). When I hear from American colleagues they complain of red tape more than my friends in Canada do.
Where you see higher taxes it means you get something for free. Typically it's healthcare and/or education. With comparable living standards the spending per person is roughly the same, the question is who is paying and how.
I.e. higher taxes = no need for medical insurance; lower taxes = you should include private insurance in your overall calculations.
I'd say the spending per person might be higher in the US due to private medical insurance, i.e. you have a middleman who works for profit. In more social states there's no middleman and healthcare is cheaper, regardless of how it's paid for.
I understand the sentiment as I recently had norovirus and got stuck waiting forever to get into a clinic.
That said, if you get into a car accident and are taken to the ER with serious injuries, you will not wait. You will be patched up with some of the best quality care in the world and leave without paying a dime.
Our system isn't perfect but I'd take it over any system where someone can be financially ruined due to an accident, or worse yet have to take shortcuts that jeapardize their health to try and avoid this.
I pay less tax in Switzerland, including health insurance (which is paid privately, not via taxes or by employer), than I did in the UK, and get much better service.
(Conversely I pay more for a bank account and get worse service. But it's negligible compared to taxes of course.)
I've worked as a software engineer both in Canada and in the US. The taxes were no different and I got far more for my taxes in Canada than I did in the US.
The US does sink a considerable amount into what I would call "discretionary social services".
In comparison Canada seems to only spend ~300 billion on healthcare, and ~300 billion on social security. Their economy is a 6x smaller in terms of population, 3x in terms of GDP, so proportionally, saying 4x (4x600 =2.4 trillion) they spend about the same as the US does (~2.5 trillion).
The purported difference in quality is probably mostly to do with drug cost, whereas US drug companies can and do charge premiums Canadian ones can often create or source relatively safe knock-offs, while they may not have the same (number of) sophisticated facilities that the US might have.
At least for those taxes, one gets somewhat free healthcare. I’d rather pay higher taxes and get access to a solid public healthcare system, rather than relying on the expensive private care in the states.
The healthcare system is not as solid as one might think. Getting family doctors in certain provinces is almost impossible - the waiting lists are months to years now. Seeing specialists, again 6-12 months wait time. If you are dying, yes you will get good care at the ER. But anything less urgent, you have to wait for hours to be seen. There is an acute shortage of doctors and nurses. And there is no proper solution being put forward by politicians. Some of them are focused on gutting the public healthcare system so that private players can move in and reap profits.
I'm a Canadian that's been trying to get into this field. There is no "talent" issue. Any job that pops up is flooded with applicants.
It's night and day compared to America. All the companies are in America, while we find only a handful of start ups or some branch's of corporations in Canada.
Give a read to the /r/cscareerquestionscad subreddit
There's countless stories of "I have CS degree, intern experience, and portfolio of projects but after 500+ applications I can't land a job".
Articles like this make me want to quit everything. I try so hard to get into these field then the government claims no one can fill these roles and we need to import more people instead.
The "digital nomad visa" is for foreign workers working for foreign companies to work while residing in Canada for up to 6 months (there are tax and residency implications if you stay longer than 6 months).
This is not directly competing with Canadian citizens looking to work for Canadian companies.
The directly part is because while in Canada, it is possible that a digital nomad may apply for and get a job for a Canadian company in which case the visa can get changed and they can stay longer.
But the digital nomad 6 month part isn't competing... directly.
Promoting Canada as a destination for digital nomads
A digital nomad is a person who can perform their job remotely from anywhere in the world.
Under current Canadian immigration rules, a digital nomad only needs visitor status to relocate to Canada for up to six months at a time while they perform their job remotely for a foreign employer.
In the months ahead, IRCC will collaborate with public and private partners alike to determine whether additional policies to attract digital nomads to Canada would be desirable.
We expect that some digital nomads who initially enter Canada to work remotely will decide to seek opportunities with Canadian employers. When they receive a job offer from a Canadian company, they would be able to bring their skills to a Canadian employer by applying for a temporary work permit or even permanent residence.
> There's countless stories of "I have CS degree, intern experience, and portfolio of projects but after 500+ applications I can't land a job".
That's bullshit, or you're looking at the tail end. Or these people are applying for jobs that require experience without any. What's their interview success rate? What's their target salary? They can't land any job? Ridiculous.
If there really was an overload of talent in Canada, it would be pumping out unicorns - it's not.
If there's 1M canadians in tech I would expect tens of thousands of those stories to be true.
The more talent there is in Canada, the more talented work can be done. The two most famous tech companies were founded by people without college degrees, just access to the American talent market. You can look good on paper, complain to the world about it, or actually get shit done.
Someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread that Canada has high taxes and a difficult bureaucracy. If Canada's government is business-unfriendly and their closest neighbor and competitor is the USA, then Canada might face a lack of people with talent for business. As in, the sort of person who would pump out unicorns would rather move to the US.
Then they would have lots of talented CS people, but nobody to hire them.
Yeah that comments is bullshit. It’s very easy to establish a business in Canada. The bureaucracy is efficient by comparison to most developed countries including the US. The tax authority is not scary like the IRS and the rules are reasonable and easier to understand. The provinces have considerable control over economic policies and taxation, generating competition between regions.
I’ve run tech companies in Canada for over 20 years. It’s a perfectly fine place to do business.
With the U.S. tax changes preventing early stage startups from deducting their employees' salaries from revenue outright, I wonder if we'll start seeing more Canadian-based innovation.
I think historically the thing preventing startups here from taking off was lack of access to capital
I’m guessing that change will be eliminated by congress. It’s sort of an unthinkable disaster that will find a compassionate ear on both sides of the House.
It seemed very intentional. Along with the recent monetary policies I would be surprised if this wasn't another hammer they're intentionally swinging to cause recession
It's very easy to set up a company in Canada. Taxes are an issue, but not that much more than CA or NY.
The issue is that you'll get offers of 75k from angels and 500k from VCs. You go to SF, and before your pitch is done, you have a seed of 1M signed and ready to go.
> The more talent there is in Canada, the more talented work can be done.
Eh, no. If you ship a bunch of CS majors off to a cattle farm, they aren't going to get hired to do websites for the cows.
You need demand for the talent or the talent is not economically useful.
The is more obvious when you think about other areas that require talent but underpay (or have a talent glut), e.g. music, art, dance. Becoming a musician on average will not result in fantastic pay, yet composing music and playing an instrument both require talent.
> or actually get shit done.
You assume there is shit to get done - new companies take venture capital (either from a VC or a Bank) and a business plan to be profitable. Lacking those, if the companies that are successful are not going gang-busters wild profitable, they likely don't have the capital to expand their operations, and new people seeking to break into the market won't be able to fund themselves to do so.
There's no unicorns because there's no VC. Everyone here is busy using their capital to trade houses with each other. For the few investors that do exist, you're expected to show multiple months of profit just to get tiny seed rounds.
I don't think it's day and night compared to the U.S. I was looking for a job for 7 months already and can't land anything. 10 years of experience as DevOps/SRE, permanent resident.
So tried to find some basic job and it is even worse there. DoorDash is not hiring anymore, all my applications to custodian and similar jobs got rejected. I went to a bunch of restaurants around the town and applied to dishwasher, cook and similar positions, filled their forms and never heard back. I don't know what to do.
Those are new grads and frankly most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those, may as well hire an Indian contractor remotely.
The choice is between jobs going offshore or people coming to work here as most new grads are not job ready. I have interviewed ones who have never done a pull request before.
>Those are new grads and frankly most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those, may as well hire an Indian contractor remotely.
Presumably you exclude Waterloo, Toronto, UBC, and McGill from the list of awful programs. What do you have in mind? Brock? Guelph? UVic? UPEI? MUN? Lethbridge? USask?
A lot of those are likely mediocre, but probably ok(I have never encountered a grad from those programs admittedly), but many aren't even coming from undergrad CS programs but from the diploma mill colleges like Seneca and Sheridan that hire fake professors or from one year masters in CS programs. Don't get me started on the career colleges, one of which offered me an instructional job in my third year of university.
How do you expect a new grad (assuming no internship experience) to have done a PR? I agree the university should've taught version control, though.
I am an Indian graduate who has decent experience with actual programming, even contributed to open source, and yet struggled to get a job in between my peers who have done 300 Leetcode problems and nothing else.
So I assume the hiring meter for most juniors is not "can use version control" or "can architect a 1000 line codebase with decent OOP". It's "can recurgigate 300-500 common Leetcode problems and can cheat in online coding tests". We are all in a bubble.
I don't really care how they get it, just that I do not have to train them in it. An employee who requires tech training is a pain to have around. You need people ready to get to work.
Some companies do focus on Leetcode, that is true. Mine do not, but on the other hand we expect you to fit neatly into the role of developer without needing to be told about Docker, GitHub, testing. Tons of grads have no idea of the difference between a unit test and an integration test.
As someone who hired a bunch of recent grads in Canada, you couldn’t be more wrong in your assessment or in your conclusion, but, this is the internet so :shrugs:
Booming field that outsiders don't understand will continue to attract deadweight useless people.
Of course there's a bunch of people that can't find jobs, a CS degree is not a rigorous endeavour, there's no bar exam, no MCAT. Just a bunch of people who think it's a free lunch surprised they have to compete for it.
That is a lot of it. There has been a proliferation of Masters in Software degrees up here that anyone can sign up for, pay a few grand, and graduate with a degree from in a year.
99% of CS is about communication, not your ability to code
and
most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those...
are incompatible with one another. Which is it, HN? Do you want the Indian guy who can't speak English, doesn't understand you, but can whip up a microservice architecture in a week or the Canuck with whom you can communicate, will learn from you, but does not know anything outside of Java?
> 99% of CS is about communication, not your ability to code
There is a minimum level of useful skill that is required to avoid having to spend a bunch of time training them.
Neither the Indian CS person or the new grad are great options. Ideally you want senior devs. But given the choice, I would prefer the Indian CS person as then the communications become more Product's problem than technical mentoring which is mine.
Countries that export to US [1] or to EU,
and US itself will have an unreasbly (un-deservedly) high standardard of living.
That will always attract both talent and con-artists to US, Canada etc.
Because for the same amount of effort (or same amount of risk for the con-artists) -- the rewards are much higher.
This will only change if US currency will stop being the reserve currency of the world.
When (or if) US will stop being reserve currency of the world, it will cause a cascading effect that will likely cause a temporary collapse of the socio-economic, judicial, and political pillars of Western economies and Canada, Australia.
Then all these talent acquisition strategies will stop working.
All the policies will turn towards reducing chances of civil wars that will be breaking inside these countries.
Until then, it is hard to blame immigrants for seeking higher standard of living for the same amount of effort.
And governments will not really care what will benefit the locals. Because the political systems in Canada, US, UK are not really representative of the people, they are representative of the lobbyist and powerful interests.
It used to be that Canada brought in more and more immigrants in order to have de facto slaves to work in service jobs like retail, delivery and what not: you know, to help uphold the standard of living for the previous immigrants who upgraded their education and skills and became mega consumers. People who drive their SUV to a "U pick" farm, and just buy a box of washed and sorted blueberries in the parking lot, ... rather than working in such a place.
Unfortunately, those service-job immigrants are now priced out of housing due to all the previous immigration.
So in order that residential properties continue to inflate, we now need to bring in "tech talent": immigrants who have some ghost of a chance of actually affording to live here.
In some ten years, Immigration Canada will be all about attracting "CEO talent", "chief of hospital talent" and such.
Thank you - was really trying to understand why OC was being sniped at with a Grand Theft Auto reference (much less what the ref was supposed to imply...)
If I wanna visit Canada, I can spend a few weeks/months in the places I wanna see (Quebec, BC, Alberta), work remotely for a US company and make 2-3x the money w/o spending half my income on taxes/insane rents.
There's two sides to the immigration issue. On one hand, you can bring some very great people who are in terrible situations and will work their damndest to contribute and create a life for their family.
On the other hand, Western countries are very indebted and the only way out is growth. Immigrants tend to have more kids, and work harder, longer hours for less money.
There's a reason white millennials in north america aren't having kids and growing the economy: it just simply doesn't make sense. It's not obtainable.
Anyone interested in this should also check out Canadian home prices, rental prices, the broken healthcare system and the peanuts that Canadian tech companies pay. You will be glad you did before jumping ship.
Yes, but that's an unacceptably low standard. Canadians (myself among them) spend way too much time looking to the US to feel better about themselves and way too little time looking to the world to see how they could improve. It's virtually impossible for me to see a doctor where I live (capital and second largest city of Canada's third largest province) outside of going to the ER. It's nice that ER trip won't bankrupt me, but that's not good enough.
What do you make of the local tech market in Victoria? Are there many tech companies with offices downtown or do most people end up working remotely? It seemed a lovely walkable city when I visited recently.
Supposedly the tech industry here is pretty significant, but there aren't a lot of "HN-y" companies...I think Workday has an office here but that's about it. There's a few bespoke software shops and mobile game makers, probably a fair number of companies that do government or naval contract work, and some "eco" tech - companies that make sensors for underwater monitoring and stuff. I don't know much about all this, myself - as you said, I work remotely for a US company.
The usual Canadian caveat definitely applies: tech salaries are way lower than in the US. And the discrepancy between those salaries and cost of living here is pretty extreme even by Canadian standards.
We're also suffering from the typical West Coast city problems of homelessness/drug abuse/mental illness/property crime.
But, on the flip side: you get the best weather in the country, your backyard is some of the most beautiful nature on the planet, we have a vibrant and unique and walkable downtown, we have tons of great biking infrastructure, and there's reasonably convenient access to both Vancouver and Seattle when you need them. I love it here; it's a city with a lot of problems but a lot of potential.
I love it here too, but as someone young(ish) with a stable job and who got into a home outside the downtown core before the latest boom.. it's a lot easier to look past Victoria's faults.
As someone that's used to live in Canada and is currently in the USA, this is not true. Six month wait time to get an x-ray for a hairline fracture, people dying because of long wait times for cancer screenings etc. In the USA things are expensive but you at least get access when you need it.
What does an endocrinologist have to do with a hairline fracture? Also, 4 months to see a specialist in the USA isn’t really uncommon if your case isn’t urgent.
That's correct, if a doctor has ordered an X-Ray for you, you can walk into a lab and get it right away. The GP made up that specific example and it was wrong but I think their broader point is correct that there is a severe lack of access to basic health services in Canada. In British Columbia, about 25% of the population has no access to a family doctor, and an other 35% or so report being unable to easily book an appointment with them. Wait times to see a specialist actually are many months, and doctors are reluctant to give any referrals to them. In fact, it is difficult to get doctors to take anything seriously. IME they do very little proactive work and getting them to think critically about what could be the underlying cause of an issue rather than just telling you to try Tylenol is very difficult. There is zero recourse and you can't go to a different doctor because it's impossible to find a family doctor these days, at least in the Vancouver area. I've called dozens of practices within a couple hours of Vancouver and none are taking patients. Many literally turn off their phones and don't answer them anymore because it's easier to only have patients email them. There are no consequences for bad service because again, you have no choice, and of course they don't care about negative reviews.
It's common for doctors to have a "single issue per visit" policy these days, which is completely ridiculous because obviously a patient's entire overall condition should be taken into consideration when deciding on a strategy to address issues. And patients are not themselves medical professionals, they are not really in a position to say that two different symptoms are actually unconnected. But doctors are paid by the government on a per-appointment basis so they want to churn through as many as possible. They want you out the door ASAP.
We basically are dealing with third world level of care in this country, and Canadians accept it because "at least we're not America". Even middle class Canadians are being forced to travel to the US to receive basic services in a timely manner.
I agree with almost everything you wrote except for the conclusion. In no way is this a third world level of care. Your statement that middle class Canadians are being forced to travel to the US to receive basic services in untrue. The situations where Canadians are travelling to the US are very few and far between and for very specialized things, like specific spinal surgery procedures. We should absolutely be doing it Canada in a timely matter, but don't blow things out of proportion.
I particularly agree with doctors doing little proactive work, but this is very doctor dependant. I've had doctors who are like this, and others who been quite proactive. I don't see what that situation would be any different in the US.
Honestly asking though, what good is that? They can't take a look at you really, they can't refer you to a specialist, or order any tests for you, and if they find something somehow, they can't prescribe anything or perform any procedures. Or am I mistaken?
I was not meaning to convey confidence in my question, I don't have any experience in paying for out-of-province doctors, that's why I asked the question in the first place, and even asked if I was mistaken. I was asking if all of those things are the case or not...
It’s true that doctors are limited in what they can do without a physical exam. But a lot of doctors’ appointments are for things that can be handled remotely, such as renewing a prescription.
You're wrong. Maybe you lucked out, know someone who pulled some strings for you, or or you're just a liar, I don't know. But the Canadian Institute for Health Information published "Wait times for priority procedures in Canada, 2022"[1]
Presumably wait times in the US are made shorter by the fact that many people can't afford medical treatment at all. If it's expensive then it's less accessible, or inaccessible, by definition.
No, that does not follow. Just because the government aims to provide access to everyone doesn't mean that they do. 25% of British Columbians have no family doctor, and up to 60% find it difficult to get an appointment with one. Seeing a specialist can take a year, in many towns there's no doctor at all and the community has to get by with a nurses only. Canadians have no control and no choice when it comes to their health care, they are completely at the whim of the doctor who only wants to churn through as many appointments as he can, since he's paid on a per-appointment basis. We cannot exercise choice because the fact that we found any family doctor at all makes us one of the lucky ones and likely we can't get any other.
My point was simply that the wait times in any medical system can be shortened by increasing prices. The fundamental problem of insufficient capacity remains; the burden is just shifted onto a smaller set of people.
I didn't mean to minimize the issues with Canada's medical system, and I can understand why there's so much frustration from people who have to deal with it.
For the large majority of Canadian residents there is nothing technically stopping them from traveling to the US for healthcare, paid out of pocket. Some people do that, in some situations, particularly for those who live just north of the border, but it's uncommon. Some reasons:
- From the experience of people I know who have needed urgent care (heart attack, cancer, anorexia, broken bones, etc), my Ontario provincial health system works pretty well, and was often excellent. The people I know received timely, high quality treatment (despite all the bad press in the news these days), at zero out of pocket cost.
- The areas that Canadian healthcare is most falling behind on are (a) access to primary care, and (b) treatment of serious things that probably won't kill you (e.g. joint replacements, cataract surgery). For (a) few people are going to travel to the US to see a family doctor. For (b) this is mostly seniors, who usually decide to grind through another 6 months on the hip replacement wait list rather than pay US$50k today.
- US healthcare is very expensive if you're paying list price. Waiting longer and getting free care in Canada often looks pretty good by comparison. Any reimbursement from your provincial health insurance will be a small fraction of the total US bill. Maybe you could save a month on getting treatment for your cancer or whatever, but is that month worth US$100k or whatever out of your family's life savings? Most people decide "no".
- Where will you live in the US while receiving treatment (e.g. for cancer)? Will your job allow you to be away? The cost of travel and lodgings adds to the cost of the already expensive healthcare. And if you feel crummy (e.g. because you have cancer and you're on chemo) you don't want to have to go through airports and live in hotel rooms, you want to be in your home.
- If despite all the above you decide to be a medical tourist, why would you choose the US? Once you're hopping on a plane and paying cash, there are often better countries in the world. I have heard of people going to Mexico, Lebanon, and India for treatment, and much lower cost than the US, while still getting high levels of care.
Lots of Canadians do just that. Even when I was a kid, long time ago, my best friend had to go to the US for urinary tract surgery. It is effectively a 2 tier system with the second tier being "Go to the US".
If you're in the bay area, you made it to USA and therefore have "good" health insurance. Try paying for your own health insurance out of pocket if you lose your job, and you'll quickly realize that same insurance google provides will cost you upwards of $2500 / month without any copays or deductibles.
You get access to it when you need it IF you have paid for insurance. Otherwise, maybe you're on a bronze plan and whatever specialist you need to see costs $10K out of pocket, on top of the $30K in coverage you already have to pay just for base insurance.
> You get access to it when you need it IF you have paid for insurance. Otherwise, maybe you're on a bronze plan and whatever specialist you need to see costs $10K out of pocket, on top of the $30K in coverage you already have to pay just for base insurance.
When I was shopping, I didn't see any difference in coverage by changing the metal. I went with the Bronze, because it had the least total for monthly costs + out of pocket max, which in theory means if I don't use much, I pay less, and if I cap out, I pay less. The other metals make more sense, IMHO, if you have a lot of contact with the medical system, but not enough to hit the out of pocket max. Of course, employer based plans can be a lot better than marketplace plans, most/many marketplace plans don't over coverage out of your home area/state, where a lot of employer based plans have nationwide coverage. It's a mess.
Not paying your medical debt doesn't necessarily 'send' you to bankruptcy(stays on credit report for 7 years generally, unless enforced by a court order - which it usually doesn't), you have to actually file for it. But we're arguing with semantics so I'll just agree with you.
However, that is not what you said.
Your comment implied that someone has to be approved by insurance to receive treatment, which is not true.
People get denied all the time at the pharmacy for lack of insurance. Without insurance many drugs are simply unaffordable and they get turned away for lack of funds.
It is because this always comes from the perspective of younger people.
Canada might be better if you are 20 and break your arm.
No one over 50 and worrying about death would rather be in Canada though.
I had family members who had heart attacks at roughly the same time, one in the US and one in Canada. It is unbelievable how slow everything goes in Canada when they were both needing basically the same treatments.
There are many dimensions by which to compare healthcare systems (e.g. availability of care, cost, quality, speed) and different samples and statistics to consider (means, medians, 10th-percentiles, different demographic groups e.g. different races, different worker groups e.g. tech workers).
It's complex, but overall the US system is better than Canada's. It's not as clear cut comparing the US to some European countries, but with Canada it's mostly clear cut. And it's especially clear cut for tech workers. If you work in tech, you're highly likely to have very good coverage through your employer, you will almost surely experience much better availability and speed of care, probably better quality, and the extra out-of-pocket costs are absolutely dwarfed by the superior pay in the US.
It's not terrible though. I broke a bone 6 months ago. 2 hours in the ER including x-rays. Orthopaedic surgeon consult 4 days later, including more x-rays. All at no additional cost to me.
After pandemic Canadian health started to noticed how much they messed up during and the PR machine started an error correction course, so you probably got the benefit of that. I'm glad that you did, but it's not the same experience for everyone. It's good to be grateful but terrible to bring down others who don't receive the same thing as liars or ignorant.
Or if whoever is manning ER deems you unworthy of services. Happened to me personally. The problem is that they think they're providing free service so they provide a shitty one. What they're neglecting is that it's not free and everyone is forced to pay their salaries by unfair taxation.
Absolutely. I know a few people planning an internal transfer within their companies to move to the US from Canada. The high cost of housing, the terrible winters and the inadequate healthcare have become unbearable.
The impression I've always had of Canada is there simply isn't enough country to sustain their level of socialism. Conservatism can be important esp. when trying to conserve resources.
Specifically, despite having higher population per square mile than the US (1 person per 10 miles compared to 1 person per 80 miles), they have about the 6th of the population, and fewer major city centers (about 10 > 500k in Canada versus about 30 > 500k in the US).
Fewer large city centers translates to fewer tech companies, more competition for housing hence home and rent increases, less reliable health care, and of the fewer tech companies that do exist they have a smaller market, hence lower pay.
Climate/terrain is also a huge issue, large portions of their provinces are either frozen tundra or "back-woods-y", which is great if you want to live on a farm or go long-distance skiing or sledding, but pretty poor for building population centers. I wouldn't want to be living there right now with the recent outbreaks of fires and smoke/smog, either (not all their fault, but).
This is not a set of problem unique to Canada, either - depending on where you live in the US the health care system can be equally or worse broken, thanks to localized over-population or under-population - e.g. Maine/Alaska have a lot of problems with being both poor and barren states with mostly tourism for industry, and simultaneously absurdly expensive to live in due to their tourism, states like NYC and SoCal suffer extreme over-population that necessitates small fortunes to even maintain a meager lifestyle and drive out lower-class workers, and on the flip side overly conservative states like Texas suffer from rampant corruption and as a result healthcare and utilities are generally some mix of unsafe, unaffordable, in-accessible, outside of the large city centers (and now in some cases illegal thanks to recent political events in the US).
> Specifically, despite having higher population per square mile than the US (1 person per 10 miles compared to 1 person per 80 miles), they have about the 6th of the population, and fewer major city centers (about 10 > 500k in Canada versus about 30 > 500k in the US).
I think you have this way backwards. Canada has a larger land mass than the US, but about 10% of the population.
It has more land mass, but the vast majority of it is uninhabitable. The US has a lot of habitable area; only large parts of the western states are uninhabitable because it's a desert, and some parts of the far northern states (ND, MN, etc. plus most of Alaska) because it's too cold.
3,855,103 sq m 36,991,981 people in Canada is 36,991,981 / 3,855,103 ~= 10 people per square mile.
3,794,100.43 sq m ~300 000 000 people in US is 300 000 000 / 3,794,100.43 ~= 80 people per square mile.
So yes, US is more populated (which is what I incidentally thought initially, I figured it was map skew not a units flip so I didn't question it), but my point remains - Canada has fewer population centers than the US.
A person might be forgiven for viewing this cynically as a way for large corporations to reduce the wages they need to pay by hijacking and bypassing the regular immigration system to import indentured tech servants that they can exploit ruthlessly and underpay.
> to import indentured tech servants that they can exploit ruthlessly and underpay.
Except that one giant benefit that this has over H1-Bs in the US is that it is not tied to a single employer and the worker isn't kicked out with little time to find a new job if they leave an old job, which are the primary factors allowing employers to exploit and underpay their H1-B employees.
You can switch jobs on an H1-B, and if you get fired/laid off you currently get 180 days to find a new job (though that used to be 60 days previously).
The recommendation was from some random group with no authority. It was hyped up by some random guy on twitter and eventually made its way to a bunch of places including here. There is no change. USCIS rulemaking process takes years, and they have not indicated that they are even entertaining it.
Only for people working for domestic customers. Others may benefit as having more people already in Canada generates a network effect. Really though this policy benefits both the lower paid workers which are not being competed against and those owning property which is enough to get support for a policy like this.
Why are there so many socialist tendencies on hacker news. Engineers are among the most privileged professionals on Earth. It’s great companies look to reduce costs. Lower cost of goods and services help everyone. Countries that meddle with the economy to keep incomes high end up having lower quality of life.
Actually, C-level execs are among the most privileged professionals on Earth. Once their salaries take a hit, we can talk about mine getting cut as well. Till then, enjoy being a shill!
The issue with guest workers is they undercut supply and demand: if a company can't find workers (low supply) and they need them (high demand) then they're supposed to raise wages to compete for them. Artificially increasing the supply of workers suppresses wages.
> Engineers are among the most privileged professionals on Earth. It’s great companies look to reduce costs. Lower cost of goods and services help everyone. Countries that meddle with the economy to keep incomes high end up having lower quality of life.
No company cares about people and no country really cares about foreign nationals (especially non-refugees). It's all demand and supply. When workforce demand is high and supply is low, wages go high. They don't go high because you have a degree but because there are less people with a degree.
Countries want these people because employers want them. If there are more people, wages could be lower but it will also attract more employers and hence more jobs for everyone possibly. There is no real answer whether this is helpful for an economy or not. It's a chicken and egg problem. Without talent there will be less companies interested in a geo area and without enough jobs there will be less talent attracted. So, countries are trying to solve one part of the problem (talent) with regulation.
I disagree, it really depends on where you work and exactly what kind of work you're doing.
Writing avionics software, for instance, I would definitely consider "engineering". And that's a bit of an extreme case; there's lots of other software out there with a lot of rigor.
But yes, a LOT of software these days is just slapped together with processes that don't resemble any kind of true engineering practice at all.
However, let's not forget that even industries with "real engineering" are frequently full of bad or nonexistent engineering practices: just look OceanGate, or the Boeing 737MAX.
Yeah, that's very true, there's definitely parts of the industry (usually those related to traditional engineering) that take a more rigorous approach to software.
I'd say it's still a very small section though, and the vast majority of "software engineers" are really just programmers. Myself included.
That's nice, but the reason there are so many "socialist" tendencies is there are so many authoritarian, nigh even fascist tendencies emerging. Companies are and have been increasing the cost of those goods and services, regardless of what inflation has been doing, _and not decreasing the prices afterwards_.
Lower cost of goods and services is a "conservative" fever dream - utter buck nonsense.
"Countries that meddle with the economy to keep incomes high end up having lower quality of life."
A corrupt person in a boardroom is the same as a corrupt person in political power - nobody benefits. Socialism at least demands those in positions of otherwise un-earned power are held accountable.
That's how it was. If you took it to use as identification of your name, they would say don't tell anyone your health status, at that time it was not something you share at all. In your wallet, you would place it at the back, or memorize it so nobody knows you have one.
Only recently, late 2000s did they start accepting it at bars and such.
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.
Check out these two top threads thread at canadahousing subreddit:
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/onta...
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.