[Majromax]

> I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers

I'm not sure that Canadian taxes compare that unfavourably to combined California plus federal taxation. A deeper, more structural limitation appears to be the venture capital environment, namely that Canada doesn't have a good one.

Canada's investable capital is dominated by pension funds, insurance companies (i.e. pension funds), and banks (i.e. pensioners). All are risk averse (https://thelogic.co/news/bdc-canadian-venture-capital-report...), which makes it hard for Canadian startups to begin scaling. Without native "unicorns" (https://financialpost.com/technology/why-canada-best-startup...), there's allegedly a failure-to-launch for the entire sector – tech billionaires being some of the most reliable early-stage investors with the greatest risk tolerance.

The porous border works both for and against the sector. On one hand that makes it relatively easy (but not automatic) for a Canadian tech company to enter the US market, but on the other hand it's also relatively easy for Canadian tech workers (founders included) to simply relocate (note the article here). If startups leave for the US's vast fields of venture capital, they're less likely to come back. Note that around the turn of the year Y-Combinator halted investments in Canadian firms (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/adding-canada-back) because they so frequently relocated to the US.

This venture capital cycle seems to be a deeply-entrenched and very hard problem. If democratically feasible tax incentives could reliably create "the Silicon Valley of X," then we probably would have many more Silicon Valleys both in the US and elsewhere.

[throwaway-blaze]

You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?

It's concentration of nodes in the graph that makes SV unlike any other place on earth.

Other places that want to be SV need to solve the cold-start problem to build up their local node set, not emulate what SV is like today.

[Majromax]

> You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?

I believe that my comment above was aligned with your premise here. I say that the tax difference is not sufficient by itself and that Canada reportedly has a very non-SV-like venture capital ecosystem.

[nxm]

It’s actually policy that incentives risk taking where 1 in 50 bets will succeed