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Canada's Challenge Is Keeping Techies, BlackBerry Inventor Says (bloomberg.com)
The former chief executive officer of BlackBerry added his voice to the chorus of people saying that Canada's main economic hurdle is keeping technology talent. From a report: "The biggest challenge as a country is retaining and recruiting the best people to build industries in Canada and not lose them to other jurisdictions," Mike Lazaridis, who left BlackBerry in 2013, said Thursday at the Waterloo Innovation Summit. Canada is pushing to become a technological leader as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tries to shift away from a commodities-driven economy by increasing funding for technology and offering fast-track visas to highly skilled workers. Cities like Ottawa, the capital, have stepped up recruitment efforts targeting expats in the U.S., while Toronto and its surrounding cities submitted a regional bid Wednesday for Amazon.com's second headquarters. The BlackBerry inventor sees Canada as at the forefront of the development of quantum computers, technology that could transform the world by allowing computers to operate much faster and on larger data sets than ever before.
Do you think people leave Canada because they want to?
Canada has had a number of successful technology companies, but they've all been plagued by mismanagement see Blackberry, Nortel, Corel, etc
It is OK if you get a job in the private sector. if you get a job in tech within the federal government, you have a glass ceiling at the CS-02 level (where you don't manage people) if you are not bilingual.
There is a reason most senior jobs are held by French people even though they make up a small percentage of the population. Your technical skills barely register, being bilingual is the most important thing. FWIW I have a CBC language ranking as a CS-04, this language nonsense seriously hampers my ability to staff positions.
The cause is lack of ecosystem, including the lack of useful and scalable Venture Capital. It is impossible to grow a venture backed startup in Toronto, once you reach a certain point and need to raise $15M, you run into problems with your unsophisticated (read: small time, inexperienced and Toronto market size thinking) investors who just want out, or get scared.
There isn't an ecosystem, so you can't build an ecosystem. And if you built a company, the only way to get scale customers is to sell where there is an ecosystem. Staff, has to be with talent that may come from Toronto, but have gone where there is an ecosystem. The only way to (usefully) exit is to sell where there is an ecosystem. There isn't an ecosystem, so you can't build an ecosystem.
I'd like to make it work... still looking for a way...
I could very easily be tempted to move permanently to the Toronto metro area, but a work visa is not enough to tempt me at this stage of my life (more or less closing in on retirement). If they could offer a faster, simpler route to citizenship, that'd get me there pretty quick.
PS if anyone at my current company is reading this, I don't really mean it.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Not sure about the CF-105 Arrow, I mean, the first flight of the US F-102 Delta Dagger was 5 years before, I'd have to look a lot harder to see if they had any special sauce we didn't. But Colossus et. al. were the equivalent of ASICs, useless once Nazi Germany was defeated and no one was sending messages using their particular devices. But in general purpose AKA "stored program" as it was called back then computing the U.K. was quite competitive with the US in the immediate post-WWII period, especially given the economic constraints. See for example the EDSAC and Mark I.
One interesting thing Canada could do is make it incredibly easy for US citizens to work in Canada. I know I'd move there if I didn't have things tying me down in the US and could have an easily portable work visa. The climate (both literal and political) is better in my opinion...the issue is that there need to be more than a couple of standout tech companies to create an ecosystem. Nortel was absolutely huge until they went bankrupt after the first dotcom bubble, and BlackBerry has basically run its course.
I do hear that Toronto and Vancouver are in the middle of a housing bubble though, so I don't know if now is the right time to move there. But, if US citizens could easily work in the Canadian labor market and not be tethered to an employer the way H-1B visa holders here are, I think a lot of people would jump at the chance to move. I've looked into it in the past, and apparently US citizens don't get any special preference and have to deal with immigration the same way everyone else does.
If they really wanted to accelerate a move, just implement a program where a US citizen with a certain skillset and education can walk into any Canadian embassy and turn in their US passport in exchange for a Canadian one. Overall quality of life seems much better there, so it would just be a matter of convincing people of that.
Want more tech talent?
Fucking pay them.
Some time ago, I went to up to Montreal for a business trip. Talking with the engineers there, they told me that Canadian salaries are largely the same dollar (number) amount as US firms pay, but their tax burden is far higher, with federal, provincial and VAT taxes taking away a good deal of that salary, plus then the cost of things like gasoline were considerably higher, making the cost of living greater. That can't help. There's also the issue of the climate. Given a choice between working in a warmer climate (California or Texas), working in the Great Frozen North is a really hard sell. There are also other issues like travel hassles to visit family, crossing international borders and so on. I've also been to Toronto a number of times for vacation and I've enjoyed it, but I always went in the warmer months. Toronto reminded me a lot of a cleaner and more polite version of NYC and I enjoyed my vacation, but I've never been there in winter time. People say the lake "helps" but I can still imagine the winter nights being dark and full of Horton's. I can't stand the darkness of winter here in Massachusetts, and geometry tells me it's far worse in Canada. So Canadian firms need to come up with means of sweetening the pot to attract talent, one knob being paying more.
Disclaimer list: 1) anecdotal, employer could have been stingy, employee could have been a poor performer 2) a big metro area, as they are expensive in the US, too 3) years ago, when the US dollar was stronger vs. CAD 4) comparing COL across countries is hard, as I pay more out of my paycheck for health insurance in the US than a Canadian does, who pays it in taxes.
11:30 Newfoundland...
(If you're not Canadian, you likely won't get that reference)
People leave Canada for two reasons: climate and taxes.
I always thought they left to find better beer.
Canada's problem isn't unskilled labor. On a whim, I looked into jobs in Canada after Trump won. (yup, I'm that guy) As a mechanical engineer, there are basically two major employers:
1. Bombardier -Horribly mismanaged
2. Mining -Since environmental responsibility was on my mind, I ruled that out.
There were a few smaller organizations, but they seemed to be shrinking rather than growing. One example is the nuclear power sector.
If the Canadian government wants a high tech industry, they need to invest in some scientific research. Sure, it's a gamble that will take decades to pay off if it ever does. It's no coincidence that The Bay Area has four national labs, and the most high tech jobs.
I was at a lab in Ontario five years ago, and that place was struggling. There was so much equipment gathering dust and in disrepair it was astounding! I've since learned that lab went out of business.
Canada already has a very simple immigration system. A lot of people who can't get into the US go to Canada. One of my coworkers immigrated to Canada from China. He ended up in the US because he couldn't find work in Canada. He used to commute between Windsor and Detroit every day until he was granted a US visa.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Pay them more, or watch them go to the U.S.
Can't afford it? Don't bother being in business then. You can't expect to pay high tech workers the same wage as you do a Subway employee.
As a Canadian Army veteran, I was trained as an Oracle developer, went to Canadian universities and colleges, and then moved to the US.
I didn't move for money, or because I didn't like the military or anything, I moved because I met someone who was a citizen of another country with a kid there.
You can make all the retention programmes in the world and I still would have moved.
Did I make more in the US? Sure.
Did I like Canada's single payer national healthcare, run by provinces? Loved it!
Worry more about the cost of housing and education and the rest will fix itself.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
None of which is very interesting, seeing as how the Dagger's followon F-106 Delta Dart first flew 3 years after the Dagger and 2 years before the Arrow, achieved Mach 3 in a test flight 8 months after the Arrow's first flight, and was generally a Mach 2.3 plane (all at 40,000 feet). And that's not even looking at the other Century Series fighters or whatever the Navy was doing with their constrained to fly on carriers planes.
I have no dog in the Canadian tech politics angle of this, except for noting that a company I saved when it was young, Lisp Machines Inc. (Symbolics' competitor), was killed off by Canadian politics aimed at an out of favor businessman. As G. W. Bush said, the French have no word for "entrepreneur" ^_^.