The whole country is a gigantic house of cards propped up by real estate, with horrible service quality, terrible healthcare, no jobs, ZERO innovation, risk taking and entrepreneurship.
Having lived and travelled extensively, most Canadians want a house somewhere in the woods instead of doing something meaningful with their lives or try and innovate to build something.
All of this is propped up by rampant levels of immigration from China and India. Where US got the best talent from India, Canada got the worst, the ones who scam their way here and take the lowest level jobs.
Now all of this is coming home to roost. The next decade will be Canada's worst and if they do not learn that risk taking and entrepreneurship is the only way out of the mess they find themselves in, they will become a third world country in another decade.
Canada has generally had a more conservative financial industry, which is a large part of why they were able to escape the 2008 mortgage crisis, and that, in turn, has lead to a stronger real estate market. Additionally, the recent post COVID-19 influx of immigrants has driven up demand for housing like crazy. There's not a lot of question that the real estate market is hot. But...
...I'd point out that considering it's population, Canada has had an impressive number of innovative companies just in the tech sector over the years. Alias & Softimage in 3D rendering. Shopify in e-commerce. Research in Motion in mobile phones. Ecobee in the smart homes/IOT space. Certicom in cryptography. Going farther back, Corel was a software giant. There's relative newcomers to with Hopper, Imagia, etc. I don't think it's fair to say there's no innovation, risk taking, or entrepreneurship.
> All of this is propped up by rampant levels of immigration from China and India. Where US got the best talent from India, Canada got the worst, the ones who scam their way here and take the lowest level jobs.
I'm not sure where you get that from. Canada's immigration policies have historically been more oriented towards merit/highly skilled immigrants than the US.
> Now all of this is coming home to roost. The next decade will be Canada's worst and if they do not learn that risk taking and entrepreneurship is the only way out of the mess they find themselves in, they will become a third world country in another decade.
I'm not sure what is fueling your perspective, but there is a lot of concern about Canada's economic policy coming out of COVID-19, in particular, the big deficits and explosive immigration are putting a strain on the economy. However, there's a very credible possibility that these will prove to be effective "investments" that pay off in the long run. Ironically, given your criticisms, Canada is taking on a lot of risk!
That and lack of venture capital/funding and, I've heard, increased government barriers compared to the USA, reduce the number of local tech companies.
The one bright spot in the past decade are the AI hubs in Toronto and Montreal - but they seem to be mainly satellite offices for USA companies.
[1] https://sexxis.github.io/classprofile/ , 2021 UWaterloo SWEng profile
[2] https://uw-se-2020-class-profile.github.io/profile.pdf , 2020 UWaterloo SWEng profile
[3] https://krishn.me/syde-2018-profile.pdf, 2018 UWaterloo SysDesEng profile
[4] https://joeyloi.com/SYDE2017classprofile.pdf, 2017 UWaterloo SysDesEng profile
Yes, you are correct that the USA is bigger and has more money than Canada. If you think about it globally (as one should), but it's worth noting that they're not so much moving to the USA as they are specifically the Seattle & Bay Area, and they're doing so at lower rates than for comparable Americans living outside those areas. Also worth noting, for the most part, they aren't founding companies in the US. The pattern is to go to the US, work for large tech companies, and about half return to Canada within 5-10 years, which is when they're more likely to engage in entrepreneurial pursuits.
Just looking at the financial might of Seattle & the Bay Area, it's amazing that 90% of Canada's innovators and entrepreneurs aren't in the US. It suggests that the country is perhaps more supportive of innovation than this narrative being presented.
> That and lack of venture capital/funding and, I've heard, increased government barriers compared to the USA, reduce the number of local tech companies.
The conservative financial system and comparative size of Canada does mean there is much less "free money" flowing around, though as demonstrated from the examples I provided, companies do procure foreign investment, particularly from the US, with comparative ease.
...and while you'll always here entrepreneurs complain about government barriers, having started up companies on both sides of the border, I can tell you that in many ways Canada has comparatively smaller government barriers. In particular, the universal health care and generally more significant social safety net also means that it's a lot easier for prospective entrepreneurs to leave jobs at stable businesses and take on greater risk. It's just one of many ways that while it is harder to get capital in Canada, you don't need as much to get going. This is probably part of the reason that a larger percentage of Canada's labour force (67.7%) [1] is employed by small businesses than the US (46.4%). [2]
AI hubs in Toronto & Montreal are more than just satellite offices for USA companies. You may recall that Geoffrey Hinton, "Godfather of AI", was in Toronto, teaching at U of T, when Google bought the startup he founded with Alex Krizhevsky & Ilya Sutskever... in Toronto. The modern AI revolution traces back to innovative work in... Toronto!
1. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/sme-research-statistics/en/...
2. https://advocacy.sba.gov/2023/03/07/frequently-asked-questio....