Edit: As expected, the Century Initiative is chaired by corporate lobbyists, and closely tied to Blackrock, that has massive investments in Canadian real-estate and would benefit from making housing more expensive:
This is not Canadians making babies, which they do below the replacement limit as in other developed countries. This is massive levels of immigration. Canadians do have a bigger per capita environment footprint, but still it’s really just moving people around.
Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.
> Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.
Canadian immigration quotas are simply out of control, about 10x per capita what the US allows.
And it's just the beginning, apparently the current ruling party is planning to give amnesty and permanent residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming year. [0]
It creates an interesting dynamic in tech.
Anecdotally, it seems there's a lot of Canadians expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Canadians could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and its Universities were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. Yet it seems the opposite happened. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for Canadian nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US. Canada maintains a net brain drain to the US [1]
Canada sure had a lot of "talent" immigrate in the meantime, but from my observations it's mostly people who can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary. The city of Vancouver even bragged about its devs being worth 50K less than their American counterparts! [2]
I witnessed it first hand. Back when we opened a satellite location in Toronto. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada. The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.
As an immigrant in the US, I don't understand this talk about higher bar for US immigration. The US selects immigrants by luck and persistence rather than by talent. Anyone with a professional job offer is qualified for an H-1B visa, but it usually takes luck to get one. Similarly, anyone with a professional job offer can get a green card, but the process is long, expensive, and unpredictable.
I left Vancouver. The combination of high home prices, high taxes, and low salaries chased me away. I solved the last problem by working remote, but that just really made me think hard about why I was still living in Vancouver.
I was born in Canada, and I would have preferred to stay. The country is a great opportunity for immigrants, but it’s an opportunity cost for me.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
* http://vimeo.com/79878808