[trollbridge]

It's a weird change though. Canada is one of the most investor-friendly and startup-friendly jurisdictions I can think of. If you want to grow quickly, you need to be thinking about how to get an office set up in places like Calgary (lots of machine-learning talent there), Toronto, and Vancouver, and when you do so you'll find the government incentives and lower wages lead to you spending about half on total compensation versus a typical American startup hub.

I worked at a place that expanded into Calgary and picked up a bunch of ML engineers with oil-and-gas backgrounds (who were eager for something outside the energy sector) and the government picked up half of the payroll tab for several years. There is also, of course, no health insurance benefits to worry about.

[curmudgeon22]

There are definitely still health insurance benefits (I'm Canadian). Yes, our doctor and hospital visits are covered, but many things are covered by employer paid insurance (or not at all):

- prescription medicine

- dental

- vision

- mental health

- things like physiotherapy

[trollbridge]

Yeah, correct, but it's not going to be a $4000/mo line item expense for the employer per employee.

I don't have to deal with this as we are a (very) small business but it's a major headache for larger small businesses. Basically, as an employer it simply isn't fun to be forced to be in the "providing access to healthcare" business when that's not your core business.

[lotsofpulp]

>Basically, as an employer it simply isn't fun to be forced to be in the "providing access to healthcare" business when that's not your core business.

It is for most large employers as it helps depress salaries and reduce competition from startups. Employees will want to work for a large employer that lets them pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars, among other tax advantaged benefits that having a well funded HR department can provide. And employees cannot easily compare compensation at other employers so they are more likely to stick around than shop around, reducing the need to increase pay to keep up with the market.

Employers can also tweak compensation by modifying deductibles/out of pocket maximums/healthcare provider networks, and most people's eyes will glaze over before they can figure out if they got an increase or decrease in their total compensation.

[red-iron-pine]

I live and work in Canada. My very generous healthcare coverage for optional stuff including dental is ~$5300 CAD. I've got kids / dog / spouse / etc. and usually opt for the extra coverages including life insurance. Work covers about half of that. 4% tax (which funds the socialized medicine) plus the 2k, call it 5.5% of salary and I get good healthcare in a large Canadian city.

My US benefits were middling in terms of coverage and package when working for a large F500 and went about $16k USD on a 180k salary -- converted is about $19k CAD at todays rates. Including co-pays and fees it's like 10% of salary. At the time I was in a big city with great hospitals and doctors, but not noticeably better than Canada even at the higher price.

[chris_wot]

If only there was single-payer universal healthcare, huh?

[tokyobreakfast]

> Canada is one of the most investor-friendly and startup-friendly jurisdictions I can think of.

Other comments in this thread make it sound like an absolute nightmare. So which is it?

[gucci-on-fleek]

Much like the US, the regulations and culture varies depending on which province (state) you're in, so someone starting a business in Alberta could have a very different experience than someone in Ontario.

[1attice]

Somewhat. Our provinces have fewer rights, powers and responsibilities than US states. The experience is more homogenous.

It's only a nightmare if you hate all taxes and labour rights. So, you know, YC

[tptacek]

You can still run a company from Canada under these terms, the same way every international YC batch company runs --- you can just go to the YC directory and select for EMEA, LATAM, APAC, &c. There's hundreds of them.

Since this is purely about ownership structure and equity governing law, I'm curious what the intersection you're seeing between these terms and "labour rights" are. We're a US company with employees in Europe (not even an HQ in Europe, just employees there), and I've learned more about European labor law idiosyncracies over the last few years than over the whole rest of my career, because I've had to.

[gucci-on-fleek]

> You can still run a company from Canada under these terms, the same way every international YC batch company runs

Having a Canada-registered company is usually required to get government grants and loans from Canadian banks, although that's probably not very important to VC-backed companies. There are also some tax advantages to running a Canada-registered company if you're based out of Canada, plus it's much easier to find a local professionals (lawyers, accountants, etc.) familiar with Canadian corporations than US corporations.

None of these issues should cause too many problems, but if given a choice, as a Canadian I'd certainly prefer to run a Canada-registered company over a US-registered one.

[tptacek]

I'm sure a lot of British people want to run UK-registered companies! I'm not saying Canadians wouldn't rationally prefer to have the option of taking investments in a Canadian corporation, just that it doesn't look like there's a lot more to this than details for your finance person, and that it's the same deal every other country gets.

Read the thread: clearly a lot of people are reading this as "you can't HQ in Canada, your team has to move".

[ragall]

> We're a US company with employees in Europe (not even an HQ in Europe, just employees there)

I don't think that's true. You can't have employees without a local subsidiary. If you're going through an EOR agency, they're contractors not employees.

[gucci-on-fleek]

> Our provinces have fewer rights, powers and responsibilities than US states.

It's complicated. In theory, US states have more rights and powers ("The powers not delegated to the United States [...] are reserved to the States" [0]), but in practice, the Commerce Clause lets the Federal government do essentially anything that it wants. Canada's provinces are only given control over a specific set of topics [1], but their powers are almost absolute in these areas, since the courts almost never let the Federal government interfere.

So for labour code specifically, US companies need to adhere to both Federal and state labour codes, while Canadian companies only need to follow a single provincial labour code. (There is a Canadian Federal labour code, but that only applies to Federally-regulated companies, and those companies don't need to follow the provincial labour codes)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_Act,_1867#Part_VI...

[am3141]

What labor laws are you encountering with a 10 person software company in Canada?

[1attice]

Who said 10?

[tptacek]

Again: what does any of this have to do with labor laws? I get that you're just responding to the comment there, but you kind of started this thread with your "you know, YC" thing, and it's still totally unclear what any of this has to do with operating a company in Canada. You can still operate YC companies in Canada!

[sbarre]

> There is also, of course, no health insurance benefits to worry about.

Uhh, we don't have universal coverage for everything health up here, we still have private benefits that our employers pay for as part of our compensation plans.

Life insurance, dental, vision, prescriptions, physio, mental health, critical illness etc..

It might be less than in the US, but it's not "no health insurance benefits to worry about".

[jleyank]

Well, it's fully possible to be self-insuring in these areas. Prescription assistance is probably the one significant benefit as physio, mental health and the like can be of limited reimbursement (judging from what I've seen).

The key issue is that the core of one's health insurance is not dependent on the employer or even being full-time employed. This provides tremendous flexibility. And I suspect not having things like pregnancy being seen as preexisting conditions is a big win for parents-to-be.

Age or low-income (I think) provide provincial or federal assistance independent of employment also. Medical expenses are also far easier to deduct on taxes in Canada vs. the US.

[tptacek]

Doesn't it seem likely that tax treatment has more to do with this than benefits? People are reading this like YC isn't investing in companies HQ'd in Canada, but there's no evidence of that! I look at a set {US, Singapore, Cayman} and what I think is "this is about taxes". Maybe especially tricky for YC since such a huge fraction of their portcos are pre-revenue.

[jleyank]

The key question is whether they make non-US-ians move to the Valley to participate. Or, rephrasing, leave their home country to move to whichever piece of YC is cutting the check.

[tptacek]

Again: there were 4 countries, total, in the standard YC deal terms. Now there are 3. There are many hundreds of YC companies headquartered overseas.

The standard move in this situation is that you form a US Delaware C Corp and make your HQ a subsidiary.

[walterbell]

Delaware vs. Cayman for LatAm startups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686745

[sbarre]

You are correct but I think you missed the point of the post I was responding to, which was claiming that employers don't need to worry about paying for health insurance for employees in Canada, which is inaccurate.

[jleyank]

You can get by without private health insurance in Canada. This is not the case in the us.