[anameen21]

I'd say these examples would partially prove their point, the first being defunct since 1962, and the second having been acquired by AMD (an American company) for over 15 years. For Yoshua, well this excerpt from Wikipedia may be useful here:

"In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence incubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications. Having failed to develop marketable products and losing several partnerships, by 2020 the company was running out of money and options and announced its sale to American software company ServiceNow in November. The sale will see largely Canadian taxpayer funded intellectual property exported to the United States, contrary to Bengio's desire to found Element AI as a Canadian company to rival the world's tech giants. Bengio will stay employed as an advisor while the vast majority of employees were terminated with their stock options voided and cancelled with no value in lieu provided."

[bpye]

Well more recently we have startups like Shopify and Wealthsimple? D-Wave is also Canadian. Canadian game studios produce some of the most critically acclaimed titles, studios like Relic, BioWare, Eidos-Montreal, etc - admittedly many of these were either started as subsidiaries or have since been acquired, but the talent absolutely exists in Canada.

As someone else has mentioned, Canada has 1/10th the population of the USA, less still compared to the EU, and about 1/2th of the UK. I wouldn't say we do badly...

[DSingularity]

Damn. Bengio!? I thought the dude had integrity. Why did he not threaten to resign if those employees weren’t at least somewhat compensated?