[lyal]

The solution is fairly straight forward - create economic and package parity for Canadian entrepreneurs and workers.

It's hard for Canadian employers to pay similar wages to other countries for a variety of reasons. Most of them are completely self-inflicted: things like reliance on SRED to recoup salary costs (a program that's gotten increasingly hard to qualify for, but as a retroactive program, devastating when not won), priority selling into Canada as opposed to going global, etc.

The variability of the Canadian dollar is another huge factor. It shifts around; leading to boon and bust against the US for compensation. When I left Canada, it was at par, making $110k very competitive in the US nationally (if not in the valley). It's obviously not there now!

The funding/exit end of things is the other big challenge. A huge chunk of the "Valley Salaries" are RSUs from pubcos, options from startups, etc. It's a chicken and the egg scenario that would be familiar in any secondary market in the US; valuations are low, leading to low exit multiples, meaning that even founders who exit often don't get life changing returns, before we even get to employees. This means that options are discounted entirely in the compensation structure.. making people more reluctant to give them out. It's a bad circle.