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by amarka 535 days ago
I can’t believe Justin Trudeau would lowball your friend like that.
4 comments

People usually blame the country’s leader for any and all economic issues, whether fairly or not.
We do, broadly, have a problem in Canada with people blaming the federal govt for things that are not under its jurisdiction. We have a very federal system, and the provinces have a lot of power.

But in this case, yes, I think federal policy is directly implicated.

In this case, it's definitely Trudeau's administration fault by flooding the Canadian job market with immigrants, which lowers job compensation and increasing housing cost.
low salaries in canada existed long before trudeau and will exist long after.
They've always been lower, but it was always 20%ish lower. Now it's like 50%.

And in the meantime, housing prices have gone up exponentially. Housing in greater Toronto is more expensive than the Bay Area, but the compensation is far far lower.

I'm not one to blame Trudeau personally, or even immigration per se. I think there's a multitude of factors. But it's best not to deny the situation, which is that in the last few years there's been... problems... in the Canadian SWE labour market.

Lump of labor fallacy. The pie is not fixed.
It's not the quantity / size of pie. It's the fact that the Canadian labour market has explicit "escape valves" for "skilled labour is too expensive" built in as a policy plank in the form of the LMIA and TFW process.

They are tools that "industry" lobbied for expansion of, and got. Have persisted through both Conservative and Liberal governments for decades, but was expanded markedly under both Harper and (especially) Trudeau.

fallacy fallacy. The pie is not fixed, but does not necessarily grow >1:1 when people are added.
Right it grows larger.
not necessarily, thats my point.
ROLF
Rolling on laughing floor
They are indeed some of the best floors to roll on.
I hate the F Trudeau crowd almost as much as I hate Trudeau, but

Low compensation ranges here are in fact in part the fault of fed gov't policy. Industry freaked out about "labour shortage" and the government responded.

The database of LMIA (Labour Market Impact Assessment) applications is public. You can see for yourself how many thousands of software engineering jobs were filled this way. (Including by big "elite" tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) This was deliberate policy to bring in foreign talent from India, China, etc. in order to fill a "shortage" of us, which well, that shortage was less about "can't find someone" as "I can't find someone cheap enough."

In this case I don't actually blame Trudeau or the libs -- they're on the whole too stupid about our sector to understand that in fact these low compensation ranges harm our industry more than they help. I blame corporate interests who have the ear of the gov't and misled them into thinking that somehow this would make Canada "competitive" in information tech.

All it does is force good talent to leave the country, and encourage sweat shops to open up offering mediocre "IT" services.

We're subsidizing our own Canadian students to go through great schools like U Waterloo, etc. and then losing most of them the moment they graduate, as they go to the US on a TN1. And in exchange...

I've been in this industry long enough (25 years) to have seen things go up and down relative to the US a few times. This is the worst it's ever been. Especially because you can no longer make the argument that "I may get paid less but it costs less to live here" -- that ship sailed 10 years ago.