One thing I’ll highlight is that public sector growth has outpaced private sector during that whole time, and entrepreneurs indirectly have to pay to prop up public services only to get from a business perspective to get a worse business ecosystem than America in pretty much every way except not having to pay for employee health insurance and lower labour costs. If the idea is that the public sector’s wonderful services are supposed to help the private sector flourish, well, that whole idea doesn’t seem to be working.
The other is rents have increased that whole time, who can afford to be an entrepreneur when your lease will eat you alive before you ever get off the ground. If the argument is “aha - but Canadians could start an innovative company that relies on remote work and thus avoid such expensive leases” what is the appeal of starting such a business in Canada compared to starting one in the United States where success is far more likely due to a larger market and more pro-business environment?
Finally inequality and monopolization is just much worse than 20 years ago internationally. Why be David fighting Goliath when the deck is stacked against you? I’d be kind of surprised if the trend in the article isn’t happening internationally.
The articles suggestion that Canadians just don’t have good enough soft skills to be entrepreneurs is just insulting blaming of non-existent individual deficits that ignores systemic issues.
This example is for the prior decade, but the difference is so stark over 2003-2013 (22% public sector growth vs. 10% private) that even if the comment was conjecture, it would be a pretty good one. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/times-have-changed-p...
I'd suggest a more constructive comment might be to find an example source and ask whether it is consistent with the reasoning. These "source?" comments are low effort and degrade the quality of conversation.
It is also worth noting that the Fraiser Institute is a conservative think tank and the article does not explain their methodology. In some ways the article is contradicting itself, by making assertions that imply causation near the top of the article then admiting that correlation does not imply causation near the end of the article.
Understanding whether we are looking at causation or correlation is important here. Canada is neighbours with the largest economy in the world, with the Canadian economy being heavily influenced by the American economy. Quite often public programs are introduced simply to be competitive because the private sector is not stepping up. (At least that is the perception. That perception is important polticially.)
I found that Fraser Institute article first and went through the effort of finding the actual Statscan data because I'm well aware that a significant slice of Canadians will disregard anything coming from the Fraser Institute. I've been hearing about they're an evil organisation funded by American Corporations since I was a wee lad hearing my socialist family complain about the latest Fraser Institute study published in our local Postmedia paper. They implored me never to trust them!
In any case, their claims seem to line up with the Statscan data to me, and I don't see where else they would have gotten this data from.
It's an example that is better than a comment that says, "source?" Pretty sure public sector growth outpaces private sector growth in Canada.
However, what is "stepping up," in the private sector, as if it involves putting down our cigars and caviar and having our butlers open the jobs lever a bit, I'd suggest there is a broken ontology at play.
That would make 23% roughly the floor then for public sector growth, assuming that the increase in population requires a corresponding increase in jobs like teachers, police, firefighters, healthcare, and all the other civil servants.
The remaining 26% is the real question - who did huge hiring over the past 20 years?
An easy way to explain this is increased health care and old-age care costs due to an ageing population. I haven't verified it for Canada in particular, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the cause.
> If the idea is that the public sector’s wonderful services are supposed to help the private sector flourish, well, that whole idea doesn’t seem to be working.
Are you implying that social programs are here to help to private sector?
"once you have universal health care and every possible social safety net, then people will be able to take risks without fear of failing and innovate like crazy"
And there's no evidence that logic doesn't hold. It's not like Canada introduced universal health care 20 years ago so we can see the effects of just that.
The reason seems to be the same than France. I think in the OECD only the US managed to avoid it yet (probably a mix of net immigration, retirement age being really weird, and life expectancy 10year lower than the average
), but most of the increase is in Healthcare, specifically elderly care, and in the administration, also caused by the population being older: the overall population grow, but the number of 'active' do not, or do it slower.
Education, research and policing growth slower than all other ministry (although police funding seems to be catching up).
There is also administrative bloat, mostly due to more rules, but it seems quite contained here to ecology and urbanism (except in the education ministry, which employ now more administrators than teachers)
What evidence do you have that there is a causal inverse relationship between public sector growth and private sector growth? Isn’t it entirely possible that private sector growth has lagged because some third process has produced fewer entrepreneurs and fewer entrepreneurs results in less private sector growth? It’s possible that the relative difference in public and private sector growth is caused by fewer entrepreneurs, not the other way around. Basically, your argument is a classic case of assuming causality from a correlation.
A lack of private sector jobs can be caused by a lack of entrepreneur's. A lack of private sector jobs can cause a lot of people to be eligible for welfare. The government can then be incentivised to react to this by increasing public sector jobs, which at least makes people somewhat productive in theory while also giving them the means to provide for themselves.
I'll point out that none of the beliefs expressed so far actually contradict each-other. Less entrepreneurs could mean more public sector jobs. More public sector jobs could mean less entrepreneurs. Third order effects could mean less entrepreneurs as well.
“new businesses are responsible for 'almost all net new job creation in this country’”
Is simply bullshit, the public sector is driving a huge slice of job creation in Canada and has for the last 20 years. Now you can argue that’s a bad thing but it is a thing and this “chief economist” is simply wrong on basic facts.
I'd say this is possible at least in principle given that communist countries had pretty high levels of employment with growing populations with pretty minimal inputs from the private sector for much of that time.
If you're willing to lower your standards for what constitutes a "job" sufficiently the public sector can be a job creation machine.
No need for the particular call out to Vancouver. That’s a 2014 story. In 2023, every city in the country has an absurd housing problem. I’ve lived coast to coast over the last five years and seen first hand how it doesn’t matter if you are in Vancouver or Halifax (or much smaller towns far away from either), the pricing has gone parabolic thanks to interest rates being ultra low for two decades and housing stock being artificially constricted, and god damn AirBNB “investors” buying everything.
Thankfully we now have a ministry of finance serious about inflation and moving rates high, and provincial and federal governments cracking down on Airbnb.
Thankfully we now have a ministry of finance serious about inflation and moving rates high, and provincial and federal governments cracking down on Airbnb.
No minister has anything to do with interest rates. Only the Bank of Canada does, and it takes no input or guidance from the government.
Unfortunately I get the impression that this current BoC leadership is wayyy too sensitive to public backlash and input. And fear that the loud and problematic proclamations of the official opposition are going to lead to immense pressure to lower rates prematurely.
“ People in their late 20s to early 40s are the most likely to start businesses, but that demographic is shrinking with Canada's aging population, leaving a smaller pool of candidates as potential founders.”
Canada has an ace in the hole here (that America doesn’t) in the form of a relatively generous immigration program.
It’s time it leans on immigrants to bolster its entrepreneurship. Immigrants are by definition self-selected risk takers it’s a match made in heaven. However to fix it Canada needs:
a) less regulations on work requirements for immigrants (it’s less complicated than America but that’s not saying much)
b) better funding environment (I’m not a funder/investor so not qualified to speak to this, but I know it sucks)
c) housing, housing and lots of cheap housing especially, in the big cities and college towns where most budding entrepreneurs build the networks required to succeed.
Without c) esp Canada is DOA. But that’s a whole other post.
I have friends who moved north and applied for their entrepreneurship visa. The whole program is a pay for play scam where local VCs and incubators either demand money up front to "join" their incubator or give ridiculous equity terms in the hope of cornering a desperate founder who won't or can't immigrate easily to the states. The whole thing is a money making grift designed to enrich the friends of their politicians.
Controversial opinion: that program is mostly inconsequential at scale.
The real needle driver is the much maligned student visa program. While stuffing students into rando colleges in the far flung regions of the country (“diploma mills”) isn’t great, the mainstay colleges/universities should be encouraged to double/triple their intake.
There is an existing workflow that turns students into well-networked, educated individuals empowered to manouever the levers of power/capital. Just lean on that more.
The relatively generous immigration program is resulting in higher population growth than housing built spiking property prices. More and more of the Canadian population over the last 20 years has been recent immigrants and entrepreneurship has cratered. It’s not evident to me at all Canadas immigrant friendly stance is helping with entrepreneurship and it’s fairly plausible that it’s having an adverse effect, although it’s also plausible that it has prevented the situation from being worse than it otherwise would have been, and additionally possible that tweaks to immigration might result in immigration being more of an engine of entrepreneurship than it is right now.
To me, it seems to me that immigration is mostly motivated by politicians desperate to cover up the cost of their unwise deficit spending and liabilities by diffusing the cost across more people, as well as enriching the landed gentry with more rents. They couldn’t give two craps about helping recent immigrants start successful businesses, they want them to benefit their interests immediately, not incubate some far off benefit twenty years in the future.
But everytime it’s complaints about too much demand, but never a complain about supply. Even though they are both similar political problems. I don’t want to speculate why.
Immigrants have more than proven themselves to be good entrepreneurs once the shackles I mentioned above have been removed.
Nobody complains about supply? News to me. Trudeau has been boasting about how his sizeable immigration increases will solve the housing crisis for months now with a greater supply of workers to address the “labour shortage”. The “labour shortage” being the biggest buzzword to complain about lack of supply. Meanwhile construction has been basically stagnant and even backsliding slightly according to statscan data while he has basically given a big shot of adrenaline to demand.
Whereas a five year old could understand, if we literally just stopped all immigration tomorrow (this would have extremely bad consequences like causing an immediate recession and huge unemployment but hypothetically) housing prices would crater because Canadians don’t reproduce at anything close to replacement. But people go oh no no, the REAL solution to the problem is the thing causing the problem.
Immigration I accept is a lesser evil to the alternative, but it’s certainly not the solution to the housing crisis. It’s just not.
The federal government is (mostly) inconsequential on housing supply. Trudeau knows this and so has to do all kinds of other song and dances to distract.
If we have a labor problem let’s import construction workers, fix zoning, build a large housing fund and construction department and mobilize it. Actually work the problem on a provincial and municipal level.
As opposed to constantly kvetching about supply and trying to murder it (see: foreign buyers bans, airbnb bans and now the ever popular immigration stoppages). It’s all whack-a-mole band aids that are clearly not working.
Solve the actual problem, and that’s supply, supply and supply.
Birth-right citizen Canadians just aren’t having enough children to make that work in a modern economy requiring a big base of young workers.
Sure we have enough housing to support our slowing aging/dying native-born population if we shut off immigration. That’s not actually an improvement at all.
We agree that cost of living + housing costs are cratering entrepreneurship, and that the simple effect of supply (slow home building, restrictive zoning) and demand (more people/immigration) is at play.
However, I think it’s not an option to slow down on either immigration or keep the current slow trickle of residence building as-is. We need BOTH faster, because we let this problem fester.
>Canada has an ace in the hole here (that America doesn’t) in the form of a relatively generous immigration program.
>It’s time it leans on immigrants to bolster its entrepreneurship. Immigrants are by definition self-selected risk takers it’s a match made in heaven.
Yes, Confederation and Conestoga are just jam-packed with immigrant entrepreneurs. Why aren't they creating thousands of startups?
(Context for non-Canadians: Like the US, Canada allows international students to work. Unlike the US, Canada allows those students to work off campus. This has caused the rise of an entire industry, in which so-called institutions of higher learning (Conestoga, Lambton, Confederation) have 99% Indian "students" that work off campus, destroying the local job and housing markets.)
This has been debunked again and again[1]. Please stop. No ones complaining about unemployment/underemployment anymore and with good reason. Even the article OP posted cites a job market that is too good for entrepreneurs to take risks outside of it. Let’s just set this one aside.
The housing market and other inflation is mostly an artificial own goal on the governments part. Demand is a good thing in markets that aren’t artificially constrained.
The blog post you've linked is titled "Why immigration doesn't reduce wages", which I think is an absurd claim to make. The author seems more interested in owning "anti-immigration people" than actually proving that thesis. Citing a handful of studies does not conclusively prove that immigration is never and can never have negative effects.
The article also does not seem relevant to Canada whatsoever. You don't think that the massive lines for a handful of minimum wage job postings are in any way impacting local job markets? Does Tim Hortons abusing the TFW program help or harm the local job market?
The Canadian economy is a ponzi-scheme dependant on bringing in an accelerating number of immigrants every year and saddling them with debt.
The demographics suggest that they need young people to work many minimum wage jobs. Indeed these holes are filled by Indian and other immigrants like myself who live well below median Canadian lifestyles (e.g. 5 people sharing a 2 bedroom house). The tricky question is whether this is a net positive for Canada or not. My guess is the answer is not that simple or straightforward.
It is laughable that a country with as much land as Canada or Australia have housing issues.
Essentially it is the class that owns houses which restrict new supply under the guise of environmentalism or whatever they can find to enforce NIMBYism. The rents extracted from new immigrants are crazy high.
> It is laughable that a country with as much land as Canada or Australia have housing issues.
While true, I think it's important not to conflate "land" with "land people actually want to live in". Most land is cold and inhospitable. Perhaps people would have gladly moved to North Ontario in exchange for a parcel of land in the past, but nowadays everyone wants to be in Vancouver or the GTA.
It's not that having a working population is necessarily a bad thing, it's that student visas are a known immigration loophole which result in hundreds of thousands of "students" (economic migrants) that wouldn't have qualified otherwise. Many of them are also willing to work and live in terrible conditions[0][1], which affects jobs and housing.
Anecdotally, I know of several people that started working full time (30+ hours) doing things like driving trucks within their first year.
I live in Victoria, and while our situation is special (we’re on the tip of an island and can’t build in many directions because it’s ocean), a few developers I’ve spoken to are very confident that the housing issue’s greatest barrier is labour.
I asked if immigration could address this, and they each pointed out that a. Immigrants can’t afford to work in this industry in places where we need housing the most, b. While building requires unskilled labour, it also requires highly skilled labour that is at an unprecedented shortage which isn’t easily or rapidly corrected with immigration, c. Cities and neighborhoods are deeply attached to their reasons for resisting various densification projects, and breaking through arbitrary red tape here is an immense and intractably expensive undertaking.
They painted a very bleak picture of the housing situation, making it seem as though huge changes need to occur in order for meaningful progress to be made.
This might be less of an issue in other cities. I’m not sure.
"Cities and neighborhoods are deeply attached to their reasons for resisting various densification projects, and breaking through arbitrary red tape here is an immense and intractably expensive undertaking."
The large-scale tolerance of this is basically permanently resigning Canada to degrowth. So no, lets not accept this. It is what most cities are facing and the provincial governments need to put an end to it.
What we need is massive training/re-training + labor importation program for the construction industry (and probably also healthcare, but I digress), and WW2 level mobilization in construction, anything short of that and I'm betting the economic and entrepreneurial problems get entrenched for a century.
I agree with this notion politically, it would be a huge benefit if the federal government:
#1 - took in a bigger slice of taxes
#2 - redistributed them to municipalities
#3 - made this redistribution contingent on densification.
What we have now is some tragedy of the commons crap where everybody wants to address the housing prices, but if you call to densify any neighbourhood the local busybodies will cry bloody murder. Yet everybody wants the government to do something about housing, just not in their backyard. The only way for densification to be fair, and not result in one municipality seeing a sharper decline in housing prices than another, is for EVERYBODY to be compelled to change and have each municipality work out the finer details.
Alas, I am deeply pessimistic about change, in no small part because elected politicians are far more likely to be landlords than the general population putting them in a huge conflict of interest.
The WW2 level mobilization idea seems on point to me, but most Canadians I know seem totally oblivious to the fundamental decline of our economic and infrastructural capacities. I think we’ve lived too long in easy mode, benefitted a lot in many ways from our neighbour to the south, and let things slide too much for a generation or two.
I hesitate to say that in a sense because frankly, I don’t fully understand it. I do however understand that we’re languishing in many ways, and we don’t appear prepared to address this in a meaningful way.
It feels a bit like watching someone play a real time strategy game and noticing things are easy for them because external elements are removing difficulty from the game, so they focus their resources on a lot of the wrong stuff. Then when hard times come, they’re brutally unprepared and get wrecked while they try to ramp up to deal with whatever came for them. It feels like Canada is at the stage where the first taste of bad stuff has arrived, and we’re still fumbling with deciding what/if/how to address this bad thing. And we’d really like to continue playing the game as we were up until that point.
Maybe a terrible analogy. I’m the epitome of a layperson. All of this is opinion that should be taken with teaspoons of salt.
This is my own opinion too: I feel that as Canadians we are generally coasting on our past accomplishments/echoes of past economic activity. This blinds is to upcoming challenges and existing problems.
For example: we're ignoring the fact that our economy is heavily skewed towards "fake productive" activities like selling the same house back-and-forth to each other, and the Finance industry (an accountant friend tells me that even in Oil & Gas a lot of the "growth" happens through trading unproductive land stakes). The other heavyweight driver of activity is Government, but that can't be sustained if you're not generating value through other industries...
I also think that Canadians have a complacent attitude to daily corruption ("it couldn't happen here - that only happens in those funny tropical countries!"). This means that corruption flourishes just under the surface in many places.
I think the shortage of skilled construction labor is a huge problem in the US too. I have heard from general contractors and tradespeople that the trades have a big shortfall in the talent pipeline that is getting worse.
I can only imagine the situation is worse in Canada since the immigration system favors people with tertiary degrees.
We need to figure out how to incentivize people to choose skilled manual labor as a career. As it is the rewards don't compare with a career spent in an office even if the pay in the office is lower. That's because the office work is more pleasant and the career likely longer due to less wear and tear on the body.
Public safety employees (police and firefighters) have early retirements because their jobs are physically demanding. If we don't figure out a way to guarantee early retirements for people with physically demanding jobs in the private sector, young workers with options will continue to avoid them. And the houses that everyone knows we need most of all won't get built.
The apprenticeship model I'm the US is especially difficult. Why pay for electrician schooling, then struggle for three to five years earning $30k at best per year, when you can get more straight out of school in any white collar job?
I don't know what a better option would look like, but it is a deal breaker that some people I know personally had to wrestle with.
> We need to figure out how to incentivize people to choose skilled manual labor as a career.
You just did with the rest of your comment.
>As it is the rewards don't compare with a career spent in an office even if the pay in the office is lower. That's because the office work is more pleasant and the career likely longer due to less wear and tear on the body.
> can’t build in many directions because it’s ocean
UP! Why does everyone forget UP?! I’ve followed some of the projects proposed for development in Victoria (I am in the industry and lived on Salt Spring Island for a while), and the city has been as backward as any other city in the nation by making developers jump through hoops to get even a tiny modicum of density. The NIMBY population in Victoria is also among the most aggressive in the country.
Uncontrolled immigration without assimilation can have disastrous consequences. And assimilation is a polite way of saying "give up your culture and adopt ours."
Unfortunately, without assimilation, all the politics and problems of the homeland will follow the diaspora to the new host country. It has been seen time and time again:
- Italian and Irish emigration to the US
- Migration from the Indian subcontinent as well as Muslim countries of Africa and the Middle East into Europe and North America
If you cannot solve this but still want immigrants, the numbers have to be reduced massively and some kind of pause between waves will be required so that gradual assimilation can be achieved.
So many productive urban spaces are left as prarking lots & rundown buildings in so many Canadian urban cores as a product of rampant real estate speculation (more accurately, land speculation).
Try to develop a parking lot and the locals get up in arms over lost parking and threaten to never go downtown again if it is challenging to find parking. We can’t have nice things so long as everyone gets to have a say in absolutely everything.
Canadians have a deep attitude problem. There is a sense of smugness at not being the USA. What they don't realize is the good times happened due to geopolitical good fortune and having a ton of natural resources. But eventually the time comes when you would have to make sure that entrepreneurship is respected and encouraged and is the main way of creating societal wealth. Right now old crusted people sitting on real estate as the main source of wealth won't cut it anymore. Also immigration from India for low impact, low wage jobs is a huge problem. I have been saying it for a while now: Canada is the most overrated country out of the developed countries.
The King doesn't need to get his hands dirty in implementing policies: he has prime minister for that. What the king does is he vetoes policies he doesn't like, without explaining his reasons to PM. So I'd reframe your question as "what hasn't been done in the past 50 years?"
Lol you speak English that means England owns Canada. I know you are acting smart and speaking like a jerk but research reality and you will realize the sun still does not set for the British empire which is the Romans. They own America also.
> What they don't realize is the good times happened due to geopolitical good fortune and having a ton of natural resources. But eventually the time comes when you would have to make sure that entrepreneurship is respected and encouraged and is the main way of creating societal wealth.
Have the natural resources run out or something? I mean, I get that some will eventually, but Canada's pumping and digging more out of the ground than ever.
A lot of the "entrepreneurs" are mostly solo professionals/trades rather than tech startups. Increasingly, more now go into a firm environment instead. The firm might create more societal wealth than entrepreneurs for professionals/trades.
A plumber joining a firm should get more plumbing done when appointments, invoicing, marketing, etc. are handled by specialists. And if 20 plumbers co-owner-operate the firm, are they all entrepreneurs or private sector employees?
The opportunity cost of starting a business in Canada is too high. People who have the capital to start their own business are more likely to see better returns by investing in real estate which has much lower risk and requires less effort. The federal and provincial governments would need to stop artificially propping up the real estate sector to make entrepreneurship competitive which is unlikely to happen willingly.
Many of the programs to help with housing affordability is making it easier for first-time homebuyers to get enough money for a downpayment. There is tax break for first-time buyers, the ability to borrow money from your own RRSP and most recently the FHSA (First Home Savings Account). Long term this increases home prices by injecting more money into the system.
Well. I’ve had a lot of ideas in my adult life that I felt passionate about, but doing business here is remarkably unrewarding. I can do what I enjoy and I’m good at with an American company for 2-3x what I’d realistically earn here working at least as hard on my own business.
I’ve consulted for several Canadian tech companies and their finances often seemed remarkably poor. I know some are doing well; I’m more so speaking about “regular people” businesses. Small private companies with staff around 10-20 people.
They work really, really hard for their incomes and the rewards really aren’t what you’d expect. This seems true outside of tech as well.
My wife works for the federal government on the other hand. She earns much less than I do, yet still dramatically higher than the average for our city and the rest of the country. She also has generous time off, training, an excellent union, interesting work, etc. Why in the world would she start a business? She actually could, too. She’s an awesome hydrographer with cutting-edge skills and knowledge. But she’d have to work herself to the bone if she went private and she’d have to work in wildly different and less comfortable contexts. And for what? 1.5x the income? 2x? After that’s chewed up by taxes, she has traded her family life for a career that barely pays more when you do the quantitative and qualitative maths.
Yet I think this is a huge problem. It isn’t really wise to work hard and innovate here, and I think it’s actually harming our workforce and economy quite seriously. Look to many countries and you can quickly point at many past and recent innovations and core competencies. But what do you see when you look at Canada? There’s certainly less, and seemingly less all the time. Our small population is a huge disadvantage here, but we have such immense opportunity for innovation.
I do think we innovate in extractive industries. We do a lot of environmental research around our primary industries, and that’s very valuable. Economically though, I don’t know… We aren’t much of a land of opportunity these days, and it doesn’t seem like much is happening to reverse this trend.
This is true for tech work as well. Pay is higher in east european countries after a certain level of seniority. All in all Canada is noth worth it for the money. Everyone I know from the UK moving to Canada came back running as pay was easily higher. That means businesses can't afford people.
I found a little paradise on earth near Wawa, on Lake Superior.
Well, found, no. There is also petroglyphs there.
But damn, the lake has small island, coves, beaches.
Absolutely stunning and mostly devoid of intense tourism. ( aka : no stress to find a camping spot, you can also sleep in most places if you are respectful)
Our winters here in Victoria are great. A decent amount of clear skies, never too cold, not as much rain as people think, heaps of stuff to do nearby or a day trip away. It’s hard to beat.
Victoria is also the most expensive city in Canada, which - reading the accounts of low pay in this thread, make it seem out of reach for most Canadians.
Yes. It’s brutal. I earn a somewhat low income by SV standards, but my income (excluding my wife’s) is around 3.5x the city’s household income average. I recently bought a house for $1M and the mortgage eats 40% of my income. This was the low end of the market for a family home.
I wonder almost every day what ~70% of the city is doing to survive. We are very diligent about spending and while we’re comfortable, we still need to be careful. That’s insane. The situation is bad. Our local subreddit is loaded with people who are struggling, leaving, venting, etc. over money and work. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it.
Also weird: Victoria is the most expensive by many measures, yet remote work salary ranges never consider Victoria an expensive city. Vancouver, Toronto, they’re always on the list of course. But never Victoria. I had to turn down a role recently because it was around $40k per year lower than I’d earn in Vancouver, and I found their inflexibility and unreasonable stance on the matter incredibly concerning. I would pay almost exactly the same amount to live in Vancouver, but their calculator disagreed.
Winter in Toronto (lattitude 43.6) isn't really much different from Chicago (lattitude 41.8) and pretty much the same as most of the US northeast and not nearly as bad as a place like Minnesota (or Vermont or Maine, etc.) etc. Toronto sits at the same latitude as northern California, and while it has plenty of very cold days the total length of winter isn't any longer than much of the northern half of the US.
It ain't California or the PNW, but it also doesn't fit the stereotype of the Great White North, eh? As a person from a part of Canada with actual winters, calling this never-ending winter seems like a giant distortion. Most years we don't really have proper snow on the ground until after Christmas, and it's gone before April. Where I grew up in Alberta it's snow from late October until April.
> Toronto sits at the same latitude as northern California
This is
(a) just actually not literally true (41N at the border vs 43N),
(b) particularly off-base when you consider that "northern California" is typically a reference to the SF Bay Area
(c) completely deceptive.
Four months of the year with around two feet of snow, with an average low below freezing. San Francisco has barely ever gone below freezing in its entire historical record (literal record low of -3C a hundred years ago).
Yes yes, you don't have igloos in Toronto, fair point. But a person who drives on summer tires year round in Toronto is a homicidal maniac. In Vancouver that's merely lazy, an excuse to call in sick a few days a year.
No argument about Minnesota, though, nor about The Texas Of The North. And yes, it's hardly never-ending winters. The summers in T.O. are brutal too.
How about the Texas of the South? Here's my observation.
I would think there is some comparison between Canada and Texas as major trend-setters of their own unique culture, both philosophically and financially, within a diverse North American continent. For some things there are more similarities than differences. A lot of extractiveness with few owners but excess amounts of resources traditionally trickling down from there.
In Texas it's been declining for entrepreneurs starting 40 years ago. The most recent 20 years have been more of the same. There's still bright spots like anywhere else but overall the outlook for independents has only become more negative in the long run.
One of the obvious things nobody really looks at, Houston was founded (on an undeveloped floodplain) as a planned center of industry and commerce for Texas when it became a new nation after independence from Mexico. The idea was to replace San Antonio which had been the capital as a Spanish colony and Mexican state, and which had been inhabited by indigenous cultures since prehistoric times.
Growth-entrepreneurialism was ingrained and universal in Houston from day one, then put on steriods after the discovery of oil & gas.
After the arrival of the telephone most businesses depended on listing in the phone directory. Something I understand many young entrepreneurs have never seen nor utilized, so I digress.
By the 1970's (when everybody still had a land line telephone and the phone company was still a monopoly and quite uniform across the US) most cities had a directory format where the "white pages" at the beginning of the book were the fine-print alphabetic listing of all residential and business numbers, with businesses often appearing in bold in order to stand out among the residences, depending on their service agreement. Followed by the yellow pages which were a business listing with alphabetized categories (rather than alphabetized by business name), containing paid display advertisements, so you could look up consumer-oriented things like plumbers and auto mechanics, etc.
Unless you knew the correct name of the business, you were probably better off looking for a business number in the yellow pages, which would be maybe about the last half of a fairly massive softcover book.
In a place like Atlanta it was getting pretty crowded and they would then issue the white pages and the yellow pages as two separate massive volumes. Atlanta was a pretty hoppin' place.
But in Houston there were so many independent businesses that the phone company published a separate one of their huge soft-cover fine-print black & white directories each year just for individual business phone numbers. No display ads, just data, this was not the "yellow pages" which contained the sometimes whole-page paid advertisements, there were so many of those they were issued in two separate massive alphabetical volumes bound from the traditional yellow paper. This was the fine print and there wasn't room for the businesses within the residential directory anyway since that had already been divided into two separate alphabetical volumes of their own residential white-pages. They might have had a set up like this in other crowded places like Los Angeles.
Even after the Nixon recession had been suffered miserably by small businesses, the Houston business pages alone were about as big or bigger than the entire phone book of most other American cities, which I attribute to enhanced survival due to unprecedented high oil prices. But eventually after the Reagan recession kicked in, the business pages began to dwindle to a shadow of their former self.
We don't have the equivalent documents today to make a valid comparison with, since we're measuring thin pages by the kilo, but the gradual displacement of widespread opportunity with widespread malaise that was apparent in the macro environment has seemed to continue unabated for about 40 years now and it's about time people noticed.
Just another thing independent entrepreneurs have to face, they are an endangered species who has been under constant threat since before so many of them were born.
Fwiw, I'd still prefer living on the west coast of Canada than an overwhelming majority of other places like the U.K or U.S, even despite literally not having a job, any prospects, or the possibility of owning a home at any point in my life, even as a software developer. If I left, and it's possible, it would be because all of those factors got to a point where I had no choice.
You can get a 3 bedroom townhouse with a garage and a small yard 45 minutes from Vancouver for 900k. Is that really unachievable? Split it with a partner or a friend, rent out the 3rd room for $1k a month, and you need to save 90k for the Downpayment and the mortgage is 5k a month minus the rent, so you need to chip in $2000 a month to the mortgage. Rule of thumb for accommodations to be less than 30% of your income so your income is 6,666/mo or 80000 a year, or $41/hr.
Any tradesperson can make that. People are charging $45/hr to clean air bnbs.
Generally I approve of this type of thinking, it's how I got my start, too. So I'm only quibbling to improve the fidelity of the model for those who are like us.
1) My impression is that it's prettttty tough to get those 10% down mortgages these days. Though, again, that's behind me now, I could be wrong.
2) The bank will not consider your accom to be mortgage-minus-sublet-rent for the stress test, I promise you. They'll count your rent as additional income, at some discount (fuck you, bank), and then count 30% of that against your mortgage payment (for the stress test). I guess if you know someone who actually got this past the bank stress test then let us know, and let us know which bank, because I'll move the next time my mortgage comes up. But I have tried in the past. So you'd need a joint income of 200k (I trusted your estimate of mortgage at present rates on $810k), minus 10k/a for the rent, is $95k each, $46/h.
Still. Although it is definitely difficult, it is, as you say doable.
I meant brailsafe’s share of the down payment is 90k, and brailsafe’s partner would also have to come up with 90k. 20% down. Agree 10% down is not plan A.
Also agree on the banks being difficult to work with on including the future rental income when qualifying.
It sucks if you are a single person - probably have to go apartment route or 1 bedroom condo. The most successful guy I know, who has a pretty sick motor yacht now, had a room mate until his now wife moved in.
Right, okay. And, to be clear, back in my day 5% down (FIVE) was totally plan A, so that has gotten harder for the next generation. Thanks, fedgov!
> difficult to work with
Heh, notwithstanding the amusing savagery of my sibling comment, is "difficult to work with" a euphemism for "impossible to work with", or do you have reason to believe that this is even possible?
> It sucks if you are a single person
I would say that it's getting closer to hopeless if you're a single-income family, and being a single-income individual isn't much better, because 1br condos are actually not that much cheaper than 1br.
I'm in a condo, btw, and I could have done it on my income alone when I bought (laxer stress tests, I provided the down solo anyway, rates were lower, prices were lower), but I could not buy this condo solo today, and certainly not with the income I had then.
I guess my overall message is: I think that the type of financial modelling you were doing is excellent to show that it is not yet impossible or hopeless, and if someone wants to make it happen, it's still within reach... but... it's genuinely really hard. For decades I've been scoffing at people whining about affordability, saying that they just spend too much on short-term pleasures, but in the last decade I've kinda stopped the scoffing and shut my mouth.
The math for a 1 bedroom condo in the 20 min from downtown (not that it's relevant to my lifestyle) works out to about $5k a month if I had a clean income history and a 20% downpayment. It's just not an amount I could see my partner and I being able to absorb, nor would it be worth it if we could. It's unfortunate, because we've lived in our already relatively expensive studio basement suite for 4 years. Shit is cray out there.
I mean, I guarantee you can do better than that. The condos you describe certainly exist, but there are other options. Maybe 2 bedrooms for $3k isn't enough of a difference for you to care about, though.
And you don't need a "clean income history", that's not a real thing. You need all the people on the mortgage to have a stable job, typically 6 months. If your source of income is more variable/complicated, they'll ask for 2 years of tax returns.
This kind of doomerism is why I wanted to support applied_heat's post in the first place.
I don't really think 2 bedrooms for $3k, in Metro Vancouver would be a likely find. I'd say even if you're willing to sacrifice literally every other characteristic, but usually if you're in that range now you're looking at very high condo fees or something like no laundry in building.
But again, if space is literally all you're after, and you might be for all sorts of perfectly valid reasons, then that might be your choice. On the flipside, it would be weird for us to work relentless and double or more likely triple our monthly expenditure while basically getting only marginal or specious value for that money.
For example, even if the numbers or stability on our end made sense, and committing to that wild increase in cost didn't increase our exposure dramatically, we'd still be trading triple our shelter expenses for the added utility of basically one room and the power to knock out a wall or something.
No matter how you spin it, without a huge pool of cash and unrealistically high income(s), or a bunch of people subsidizing your mortgage, it's not impossible but generally not a sensible move unless you absolutely must own something for some reason.
I can theoretically earn above $100k, but it doesn't really matter unless that's sustained for a long time with few breaks, and that's not happening enough to bet on, such that I'd take out a mortgage expecting that income to be there long-term.
I'm not sure it's doomerism, as in, I wasn't saying things were "hopeless", just unrealistically demanding to attempt pursuit of what used to be considered a standard gradual path of upward growth. I live where I do despite that, and basically will until it's not feasible to do at all, along the way we'll have to face some seriously tricky choices anyway unless we can find someone else's basement to live in till at least our mid-thirties.
I think mortgage brokers were a bit more flexible than the big banks at recognizing future rental income, especially if you already had one property generating some rental income indicating you would probably make it work again.
For the first property I agree you would need to qualify without taking the rental income in to account.
This part is a problem, because it sounds like 45 minutes to where the traffic starts, from there another 1.5 hrs to the parts of the city you want to go.
Just because some configuration of variables could hypothetically come together in the right order over some long-enough period of perfect stability if me and my partner relentlessly pursued just that specific goal, which I don't have, for years, doesn't make it a sensible idea to do so, and I didn't say it was hopeless; just kind of a worthless and unlikely pursuit.
However, I definitely should have been more narrow with my specification of West Coast. I like where I currently live, and have no plans to move, and have no plans to work myself into the dust in arbitrary jobs to afford a type of house that I don't want, somewhere I don't care to live, possibly dependant on a car I also don't want. If someone gave me the house you describe, I'd rent out the whole thing and continue renting where I am.
Ideally I'd shoot for a 1 or 2 bedroom condo in a more central area, but the math does not work out in a way that makes any sense to me, in part for the other reasons I cited in the original comment.
It's pretty common for people to come out of the woodwork when affordability or job concerns are raised to just imagine a series of variables whereby if you just keep dividing the space, adding jobs, and moving further out, there's no problem, because theoretically you can still pay for something regardless of how much or how far or how many other people you share it with.
I'd rather disagree with the premise, and spend my time and energy elsewhere instead of on some mcmansion in Langley for an amount of money it shouldn't be worth.
It's also rude to denigrate people who clean Airbnbs for $45/hr (which isn't enough) as if it's not a skill and anyone can just switch to it. It is a skill, and I don't have that skill, or the equipment, or any of the other stuff someone would require to get operating as a business which they'd need to be. Likewise tradespeople, which software developers clearly are in some ways.
The facts are that the Canadian software development market is terrible, job volatility is higher than it's been in quite a while, and housing of all kinds is higher than it's ever been all over the country. Those are not promising conditions for prosperity.
I didn’t mean to denigrate cleaners, I have friends who clean air bnbs and they are charging more than $45/hr, I just saw that advertised. Anybody can pick up $50 worth of cleaning products and start scrubbing without any special education or training so we might disagree on how much skill is required, but my Airbnb cleaning friends definitely have motivation, and a positive attitude and outlook on life despite the challenges they face in other areas.
Either you rent for your whole life or you buy something and have to compromise on some of the variables. I see lots of people working hard, mostly in jobs they don’t love, and making those compromises and choosing to buy somewhere.
> despite literally not having a job, any prospects, or the possibility of owning a home at any point in my life, even as a software developer
I hope things turn around for you! I meant to point out that home ownership is possible, but it sounds like you have already evaluated the variables and if you are set on only living in some specific area then home ownership might not be possible in that location without a couple of well above average incomes.
I do think the mission of buying a house in an arbitrary place is kind of a misguided gen-x goal unless you have a legitimate space constraint like kids, already have a car as key component of your life, or have no established community. My point was that it's not worth relentlessly pursuing home ownership in some place just because it seems like inherently sensible goal. To acquire a house I'd need an improbable set of other variables to align, or relentlessly pursue it at all costs, and it's just so expensive for such a marginal and specious gain, that I don't think I'll concern myself with not having, whereas a few years ago it was merely a choice to keep renting and the delta between the two ongoing expenses wasn't like 3x.
Seems like you just picked an arbitrary and astronomical threshold, zoomed in somewhere that seemed vaguely close to Vancouver from the sky, and made your argument based on that. Parent was entirely correct in posing their question, because 45min from X is a giveaway.
Squamish is a wonderful small town up the coast; a haven for climbers and outdoors people. Not many people have the intention of moving there—it's quite isolated—but even still, that attached townhouse has more than doubled in value since it's last sale in 2007, probably the majority of which came in the last 5 years.
Only if you consider "rest of the world" to mean Europe + English speaking countries. There's an insane amount of entrepreneurship coming out of China and India, and a similar hustle culture. Also in some parts of Africa, like Nigeria and Kenya.
"While the lowest five corporate tax rates worldwide are held by corporate tax havens (led by Ireland), the United States and Canada have ranked ninth and tenth respectively out of 33 major economies for the past two years. The corporate tax rate in Canada is lower than all the averages of regional jurisdictions, including the global and G7, according to the average tax rates of 33 UHY international firms, assuming companies have a profit of $1 million. "
Canada's problem is not excessive taxation. It's monopolies and lack of competition and over-reliance on commodity exports.
Something is paying for Canada's massive public sector. What do you think it is?
As for California, a lot of companies moved to Washington to escape the high taxes. Washington used to be a low tax state, but no longer, and companies aren't moving here anymore.
(Washington recently added a capital gains tax, payroll taxes, a $.50 per gallon additional gas tax, and boosted the sales tax to 10.1%.)
Why don't you try using facts and numbers instead of insinuations, then? Show me how Canadians are being screwed on taxes.
Actually I know working class Canadians are -- Canada's system is actually not very progressive compared to many US states, the bottom end of the tax bracket is fairly heavily weighted... but corporations here are sitting pretty. Best gig in Canada (after real estate) is to be a fake "contractor" paying corporate taxes instead of personal income taxes, and stashing your wealth in corporate assets and paying your spouse dividends... it's ridiculous.
In any case, to throw it back: Something is paying for the US's massive defense sector. What do you think it is?
So, so many people have recommended I do the fake contractor thing. Dude, just pay your wife to do “HR stuff” or something. Wait, why buy a personal vehicle? You could buy one for your company to travel to client meetings. You know you could be putting X amount into your “business”? Why lose all this money in taxes?
The thing is, we need people to pay taxes because our public systems are having major issues and people earning or paying less is a real problem for all of us. Would I like to get more from what I earn? Yeah, in a sense. Do I need it? Not as much as the average Canadian. Not even close.
It does seem like in the last 10 years the tax code in Canada has become more strict and the CRA really doesn't like single-customer "corporations" anymore and ends up taxing them just like employment. So some of the holes at least have been plugged.
For 10 years I worked at Google and pulled in what I would consider a ridiculous salary. But over 50% of it was pulled away in taxes. I am a socialist by conviction so don't complain about these kinds of taxes much, but it really chafed me to see people in contracting situations bringing in more than me by squirreling away money, hiding it from the gov't in these kinds of corporate arrangements.
A lot of this is simply that Canadians do not desire to be rich and prioritize not being poor. That is not aligned with entrepreneurship. Our culture is very poorly suited to it.
I know because I am one of those people.
For example, I have participated in numerous entrepreneurship accelerator programs, as have my friends. How many of us spent any time on our companies after finishing the accelerators? Zero. I know people who put the winning of 200K on their resume, went to get a corporate job, and just returned the 200K in prize money later, as the purpose of the prize was to be publicly named as winning the prize. This person now works for RBC as a software developer.
I won 20K with a friend a few weeks ago for our startup (which was generated just for the competition). We intend to hand the money back at the progress deadline, as he is a new grad and it helped him to get a job.
Canadians are also very suspicious of people who do go into business for themselves. American companies will hire entrepreneurs. Going to YC is not a career derailer. In Canada, we would assume that if you started a company that you couldn't find a job. I have been in the (virtual) room as resumes are tossed as the hiring manager assumed "Co-Founder" was just a synonym for unemployed.
Anecdotally, Canadians need more money to work for a startup, not less as in the USA. Americans take pay cuts to work for startups in the hope of a giant return. Canadians demand a pay premium to work for a startup, over say RBC.
The other issue is that Canadian consumers also do not take risks. We don't try new products or switch suppliers. Consider our high internet costs. There are tons of other options, but even when CBC went out and told people about them, they refused to switch as they didn't want to take the risk.
> There are tons of other options, but even when CBC went out and told people about them, they refused to switch as they didn't want to take the risk.
That's a 6 year old article. Most alt/independent vendors have basically been gutted or acquired by the incumbent oligopolists.
Was with 2 providers (Teksavvy and eBox) that jacked up their prices above what the "flanker" providers by incumbents were charging. There used to be quite a savings, but that's vaporized.
Coextro might be worth investigating, I'll admit. Thought they only did own-fibre to bigger buildings.
Anecdotes on top of anecdotes, but this post captures the Canadian mentality well in my opinion. Though his name is _verboten_, Jordan Peterson goes off in this direction. His common words are that Canadians are suspicious of success.
I don't quite know why the culture is like this, and I'm not sure it's a problem. Useful to take a step back and realize that Canada is a very different culture than the US, and there simply is a different value system.
Summed up in:
> A lot of this is simply that Canadians do not desire to be rich and prioritize not being poor.
I imagine selection bias is a lot of it. Lots of immigrants for both, but the USA is where you go to seek fame and fortune. Canada is the nice and stable answer.
Canada is arguably also socially neutral on wealth. In the USA, wealth earns you respect, influence, straightforward political influence, etc. In Canada, wealth is just wealth. If anything, we are a bit suspicious of how you earned it and who you hurt to do that.
It's not surprising as Canada is self selected as the people who did not want to take the risk of founding a new country based on enlightenment ideals and democracy.
I mean... People fled to beCanada to not be part of the us.
Now we reap the rewards. America is a resounding success, and Canada is a success because it is next to America.
> Canadians demand a pay premium to work for a startup, over say RBC.*
Citation needed. Not only does RBC not actually pay particularly well, but Canadian startups pay awful compared to US ones. I've worked in both US and Canadian startups, and the latter was an incestuous joke, with everyone so delighted they weren't working for a crappy webdev or bank or insurance company that they were willing to put up with all sorts of crap.
The severe rent seeking behaviors throughout the Canadian economy are making things too burdensome to try entrepreneurship.
For a Main St type business, rents, costs and regulations are too high.
Rents again come into play for the entrepreneur, being so insanely high that they discourage risk taking and encourage people to stay at their current relatively high paying company.
As with so many things in Canada it all comes back to housing lol.
We will not have more entrepreneurship until it is dramatically cheaper to live in Canada, and that means lowering one of the biggest costs that people have, which is housing.
It's been this way since colonial times. It's either rip-it-and-ship-it extraction industries... or "I got there first, so give me $$" rent seeking & monopoly.
I don't want to be a part of the US, I hate their culture and politics. But the local elites here benefit too much from having their own little closed market to monopolize and control.
This comment, and the whole thread really, is such a mind fuck for me - someone who lives in a rich left-wing American city. Canada is idolized and worshipped here as the paragon of lifestyle - the perfect balance of capitalism, civil discourse, and welfare state support (in addition to Norway). I literally have friends making comfortable $500k+ family incomes musing about how much better it would be to move to Canada.
Yea, American liberals don't really get Canada -- even when they come here, my friends from the US... they wear rose tinted glasses. Most of it is fantasy. Canada's social service programmes are really not great when compared to European social democracies; welfare and disability payments are actually quite low, and we have pretty bad homelessness in our major cities. Canada is no Scandinavian social democracy. It's really just a fusion of aspects of both the UK and the US.
Universal healthcare is good but it's been underfunded for decades, slowly coming apart, and inconsistent across the country.
Public education is definitely in a better state than the US, though. And I'd argue our higher education / university system is superior in both cost and quality. So far.
Culturally, Canada might be in a better state. The culture wars not as pronounced (depending on where you are). Abortion rights etc. mostly a given. Gay marriage and rights pretty much unassailable at this point. Legal cannabis, etc. etc.
But in terms of bread and butter supports for regular working people, it's not that great. Though of course, again, the health care thing is a big caveat. US healthcare is great if you're upper middle class, wayyyyy better than anything you'd get here. But the average working class person is definitely better off in Canada compared to the US, on the healthcare front.
Anyways, housing prices here are way worse (relative to earning potential) than any American city other than I guess Manhattan, at this point. People in the Bay Area complain, but they really have nothing on the GTA or Vancouver lower mainland.
I appreciate your perspective. I think another crucial aspect is that the Canadian population is only 10% of the US, and the variation among states here is just like Canadian provinces or even countries in the EU. The US is very decentralized, and one of its secrets is that during times of great internal division the federal government becomes paralyzed while the states becomes empowered, and conversely during times of national unity the federal government can move mountains while the states take a back seat. Currently it’s a paralyzation moment, but that doesn’t really prevent anything from moving forwards as the system is pretty decentralized and individual-focused already.
On the healthcare aspect, there is no doubt the poorest people in Canada are the EU are treated better than the poorest in the US. I do have a suspicion that as the universal systems reach a breaking point they start to look a bit more like the US - where people pay more if they use more - to encourage better economization of scarce healthcare resources. I have heard some really fucked stories of cancer treatment delays leading to death which I don’t think is as common here (they will treat you in the US, but you might go bankrupt). It’s like, would you rather be rationed and die or get treatment and be bankrupt? I’d prefer to live myself.
Canada's population only appears low if you're not looking at its geographical distribution. Toronto is as big as Chicago, and the population density in southern Ontario is as high as any of the US eastern states, and mostly contiguous with them and part of the same shipping routes, etc. etc..
It's a population clustered near the border and really should be seen as one that is culturally and economically contiguous with the US, just not politically. In terms of metropolitan regions, much of Canada is really much the same as the US.
On healthcare / public services, I will give you examples of where the US liberal biases about Canada just don't line up.
At the tail end of the COVID-19 crisis, spring 2021 I went across to go skiing with a friend from Albany. I needed a test to get back across the border to get home. I was able to just go to a US pharmacy and get a molecular test for free, with almost instant results. I was told that if I tested positive I could get anti-virals, for free, immediately, without even showing citizenship. Meanwhile in Ontario all public testing for COVID-19 was cancelled before the end of 2020. My elderly parents in Alberta just tested positive but had to fight to get anti-virals because despite being 1 year shy of 80 they didn't qualify unless they had pronounced comorbidities. So... a country without a universal public health care system was able to offer much better universal coverage (where it mattered) than here.
Another example: say you wanted a blood test for your kid to test blood lead levels. No doctor will offer that here, really. You'd have to really lobby for it and have a serious acute reason for it-- despite all the older cities here being full of lead pipes. I was down in the Finger Lakes a few years ago and there were signs for public clinics all over offering this as a free service.
It is by no means a black and white situation. There are many aspects in which many liberal US states outdo Canadian provinces on certain social programs.
I just think it’s expected that 330 million people would have more variation than 40 million people. The density of Canada is certainly in comparison to dense US areas but the absolute population just puts thing in another order of magnitude - the single US market is insane entrepreneurially speaking. Companies get started and immediately have access to the biggest economy on earth, the biggest pools of investment capital, the richest consumers, the global military superpower, lobbyists who get access to politicians that can change other countries’ laws and regulations, and on and on.
I can’t even remember what we are discussing. In summation, I love the US, but this thread has really given me ammo to counteract the cocktail party liberals who worship Canada.
Graz in Austria with its Marxist mayor is an example of a wealthy, left-wing city. No such cities exist in the US. Just look at the recent scandals with the LA city council, the place people would probably describe as the “far left” of the USA. The leading Democrats were recorded spewing racism, plotting to screw over renters, and destroy the “left wing” council members who are in favor of what would at best be centrist policies in Europe. People idolize Canada because it seems to have a slightly more pragmatic baseline than the US, although in reality both places are pretty far to the right.
"Left wing" in the US (and TBH much of Canada) is just reduced to being about a bunch of cultural issues. Nobody on the so-called left in North America actually espouses any real socialist economic program. It's blasphemy, and "going too far" even among people who wear the t-shirt.
This article itself is a great case study. The implicit structure of this article is that Lynn got fired and became an entrepreneur because he was forced into it. They never asked him anything about what it would take to get more entrepreneurs or make his life as an entrepreneur easier.
Instead they asked 4 professors of entrepreneurship & govt. ministers who probably weren't entrepreneurs. These people mentioned twice that one of the reasons for low entrepreneurship is because unemployment is too low and jobs pay too well... the whole push for this is coming from callous bureaucrats who've never been anywhere close to entrepreneurship who apparently believe its so bad that the only reason someone would do it is if they have no other options..
What a joke.. it's hard to believe this level of stupidity , it might just be malice (a pretext to justify raising interest rates and increase unemployment)
>ell... the whole push for this is coming from callous bureaucrats who've never been anywhere close to entrepreneurship who apparently believe its so bad that the only reason someone would do it is if they have no other options..
In all fairness, isn't that a legitimate reason? If you could make a very comfy life and retire early I think many would be entrepreneurs would take the easy way out. Of course, some want the big cash out or strongly believe in their mission, but many people are there for the money.
Of course, I can't verify if wages in Canada are indeed "too well. Seems like an outdated statement if the economy up there is anything close to the US's. Legitimate reason with incorrect data is simply a misguided take.
All my late 20s accountant friends are buying houses right now. I know a chemical engineer doing the same. Likewise for everyone in tech. And a lot of people live with their parents and will inherit a family house at some point too.
At least in the US, tech is currently in a wage supression war, and I’m afraid this will ripple out all the world.
But for “a lot of people live with their parents” that’s actually a sign that things are not going well at all. This can be seen all over Europe, and just means that people cannot afford to move out, not that they like living with their parents. If/when they inherit their parent’s house they might be in their fifties or sixties, and most of their prime life is gone by then.
No, it really isn't. There's a cultural preference in the white USA for "moving out" of your parents house, but that's not universal.
Canada is very multicultural, and a lot of people choose to live with their parents as a matter of preference.
On your second point, I don't see what being in the "prime of life" has to do with living with your parents or not. But even that isnt the case , for example my friend's grandma is moving into a retirement home so they're moving into her old house.
You're joking but yes. You get to save on rent, and live close to family for longer than most people forced to move out. If you don't have to pay most people's highest expense, you can have a very comfortable life.
And since Canada's population is shrinking, this is a significant amount of families that don't have to worry about housing ever.
However, Canada has lots of immigrants, and it's very hard for immigrants to break into the housing market. Both of these are true.
It’s not only about material wealth, it’s about agency.
If you’re a corporate drone, someone else owns your time. Want to take some time off? You need permission from your employer. Want to do something differently? Need permission. Want to think for yourself or take initiative? Frowned upon at best, forbidden at worst.
Nothing wrong with one or the other, but it doesn’t suit everyone.
A union Canadian civil servant can work 35 hour weeks and be unfirable even if their actions are frowned upon. Whereas an entrepreneur often gets to work a liberating 80 hours a week and stepping a toe out of line can draw the ire of clients and bankrupt them.
Of all the criticisms I would have of Canadian work culture, lack of autonomy is not one of them.
What a joke.. it's hard to believe this level of stupidity , it might just be malice (a pretext to justify raising interest rates and increase unemployment)
The political branch of the government does not control interest rates, nor have any say in them. The Prime Minister cannot raise or lower interest rates.
This is the same in most western democracies, as such things cannot be left to political control.
I mean, they admit that they only have "considerable independence", but not "total independence":
"The Bank of Canada is a special type of Crown corporation, owned by the federal government, but with considerable independence to carry out its responsibilities."
They also add: "The Governor and Senior Deputy Governor are appointed by the Bank's Board of Directors (with the approval of Cabinet), not by the federal government."
... and the BoD are appointed by cabinet.
Does the political branch make the decisions? No. But they choose the people that do!
Does the political branch make the decisions? No. But they choose the people that do!
This by no means implies any control over interest rates. At all.
People are appointed, and that's where political input ends. And those appointed stay appointed, are not chosen lightly, markets do not react well to poor choice.
By your metric, you'd think our Supreme court judges were puppets too. They aren't.
People may have political leanings, but understand, that is not the same as allowing input where it is not allowed.
The government cannot interfere with the judicial branch, nor with fiscal policy. To do so, renders it a banana republic, or dictatorship, any attempts would be disaster, for those appointed take this very seriously.
A core part of the job is to ignore ministers, the PMO, and so on.
The governor and deputy are 7 years, appointed by directors. They control fiscal policy.
Look, I know it's fashionable to claim that everyone just ignores their roles via legislation (such as the bank of canada act), ignores change and what's happening in the world around them, to instead act as puppets, but that's just not how it works.
You say that as if that's relevant, when discussing Canada.
And you're confusing political leanings, with influence. Political leanings which can, and have changed over careers. Not to mention, some of them outlive everyone who appointed them.
This is wrong. They can fire the director (which sets the policy). As the director is not that independent (or there is no strong safe guard that she is) then you indirectly set the interest rate.
Aye, I like to think of entrepreneurs as extreme investors. They are investing their time and effort in the expectation that there will be significant returns in the market.
The Canadian entrepreneur problem is the TSX problem: it's a struggle to convince oneself to invest in Canada, because generally the returns are lackluster. Rail, Banks, Oil and Gas are the consistent winners, all well-connected and deeply rooted, and rare is the startup that becomes a star on the TSX.
It's not that there isn't enough starving and unemployed talent, it's that there's something about Canada that suffocates and debilitates small and medium companies.
> it's that there's something about Canada that suffocates and debilitates small and medium companies.
On the face of it, Canada should be a hotbed of entrepreneurship. The country has full access to the US market, has a good standard of living, has capitalism with good social nets, has great rule of law, well educated residents, allows qualified immigrants...
Every major economy is aging. Surely this cannot be the answer why entrepreurship in Canada is down.
Also, I object to the metric of entrepreneurs as a percentage of population used in the article. It is about how many successful companies are being born. You could have a very high entrepreurship rate with a high failure rate or you could have a low entrepreneurship rate with a high success rate. At the end it is the product of the two i.e. sustainable, successful businesses born per year that is a better metric. We also need to take future profitability and future-impact into account. Giving birth to one OpenAI per year is arguably better than getting 100 new dry-cleaner businesses per-year.
Canada sells and sees itself as the good boys. The conformists. The least likely to rock the boat. The opposite of that Apple ad essentially
You can see that by how often they will go with proprietary solution, even for their startups/SMEs. "Oh why don't we do this in .NET" even when there are plenty of other solutions
They will only risk the water only when they see other people way down. I'd say even Europe is not that bad in that sense.
This is about Canada, not Canadians. Rust and Java were created in the USA down the road from each other in California, by people working for US companies.
Nobody is claiming there's some sort of genetic difference that causes different levels of entrepreneurship, it's clearly all cultural. Take the Canadian out of Canada, make them report to American bosses and clearly they can create popular new software, no different to Europeans or Indians or Chinese ... the differences therefore must be related to government policy and culture.
>it's clearly all cultural. Take the Canadian out of Canada, make them report to American bosses and clearly they can create popular new software, no different to Europeans or Indians or Chinese ... the differences therefore must be related to government policy and culture.
By default, most of the top-of-field Canadians work in the US because it's at least 50% more profitable (among other reasons).
I agree with the premise about culture generally but you can't attribute all of it to culture. A great deal can be attributed to money and "ecosystems" around certain industries.
Speaking as a Canadian who moved to the US for work, I think a huge reason is that if you’re an ambitious Canadian it’s a lot easier to move to the US than trying to make it in Canada.
I can’t speak to the other external factors, but I think brain drain to the US is quite significant.
Well schooled residents, at least. Canadians have more schooling than anywhere else in the world according to the OECD. How well they are educated is questionable, however. Canada lacks the markers of an educated society – incomes are low and stagnant, very little political engagement, etc.
> Giving birth to one OpenAI per year is arguably better than getting 100 new dry-cleaner businesses per-year.
The article is written through the eyes of BDC. Is one OpenAI actually better for them than 100 dry cleaning businesses? Would an OpenAI-like business even seek funding through BDC when they can just as easily secure a payday from Microsoft?
As an Old Worlder I would like to know what this means. If you have a website or a SaaS and are located in Canada, do you mean you can sell freely, wothout restriction, and without regulatory burden, the same as if you were operating within the US?
This is what happens in a world where “experts” are merely those with “certifications at the expert level” and not people with actual knowledge and experience.
That kind of world is an inevitable outcome of large bureaucracies and over-reliance on qualifications. You don’t just get idiocracy, you get Untruths and policies oriented around expanding the bureaucracy rather than addressing problems. See also: Lysenkoism in the USSR, EU’s model of funding startups through grants.
I honestly think this one of the things the US does way, way better than other developed countries. We pay a price in cronyism and corruption, but we actually let industry experts with real experience both advise on policy and take key government positions. We don’t pretend you need a PhD in X to be knowledgeable about X to nearly the same extent as Canada and the Eu.
You can’t just stick a midwit in a university for 10 years and expect them to be anything other than a midwit, and you can’t expert an organization that values compliance and internal politics more than performance and effectiveness to produce performant or effective leaders. You can’t bureaucracy your way into a free market either.
A bunch of people with the wrong assumptions who don't understand the core mechanics of a situation surely won't improve things I agree with you on that. Calling them midwits with no prospects, on the other hand, says more about you than them.
There is nothing wrong per-se with being a midwit; most people are midwits and I never said they have “no prospects”.
What I take issue with is the kind of idiocracy you get when experts are identified according to “an uninformed person’s idea of an expert” rather than actual expertise. Bureaucracies’ ideas of expertise are usually “objective” like a degree or certification. The thing about degrees and certifications is that they are not nearly as difficult to get or indicative of knowledge/intelligence as an average person thinks they are. Especially with regard to more practical degrees like business and engineering, they simply cannot really teach you the same kinds of things you learn from actually working in the field.
Perhaps you are being a bit cynical? There are certainly no problems that can't be solved by giving more money to government initiatives like the MaRS Centre in Ontario. These institutions also create jobs and are businesses of a certain sort, so funding them is supporting business directly.
And who can argue with the results? Several promising entrepreneurs each year take advantage of these critical programs to consult with pro-business advisers who assist in job creation by recommending they apply for 3k tax breaks.
The CBC is little more than crass government propaganda at this point. Canada in general should be viewed as a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks more government intervention in our lives, is a good thing.
Spoken with the same tone and language that the nanny state and media use. It's inappropriate and shameful. I hope more people start to see through it before civil society is completely lost.
I am Canadian and am in agreement with the point to which you replied. There is no misinformation about Canada moving backwards comparatively to what it once was.
As someone that has lived in several countries, and currently in Canada, I will respectfully have to disagree both about your opinion of the CBC and beliefs about government intervention. Some parts of Canadian local/provincial/federal government seem deeply dysfunctional, but some are extremely helpful and better than I’ve seen elsewhere.
You're seeing what remains of a strong and healthy period of Canadian history. But almost every facet is currently under threat and significant stress.
You can't fund a "news" organization with public money and expect them to be an independent agency that holds the government's feet to the fire. They don't do much more than add a thin veneer of objectivity and independent analysis for any significant government initiative.
The article posted above is just a small piece of evidence for the broken nature of the media. There is a torrent more spewing out daily.
Counterpoint: You can't fund a news organization with private money and expect them to hold private organizations' feet to the fire. Any time they are critical of a major business, they lose advertisers.
Personally, I have a problem with the viewpoint that democratic governments are some sort of adversary when in actuality, private businesses are the entities that have no accountability and we have zero direct control over. I agree there should be independent criticism of government, but IMO state media from a democratic government is naturally going to be better overall than only having private media.
Everyone has their own interests in mind and so everyone has to be balanced against each other. Come on people we figured this out hundreds of years ago.
Without government picking winners and loser (through protective legislation and regulation) the free market means that honest competition keeps corporations in check. There is an adversarial element inherent in the system. The reason we have so many entrenched monopolies is because they have captured the government.. a government that has no adversary and isn't even properly monitored by the corrupt and complicit media.
I don't know why they are homeless, but there are quite a bit of homeless there; along with 15-people illegal boarding homes. Canadian real estate market is also quite a miracle.
Compared to US, I suppose. Canadian homicide rate is comparable to Balkan countries, each famous in their own way of dysfunction and corruption.
Drop the word "illegal" and you will see a lot. How do you expect illegal immigrants to get to Canada when they only border US?
The final point is quite amusing since it's the Canadian Government and the regulatory capture it creates that screws up a lot of things in Canada and pushes prices to insane levels (mobile phone plans, housing as two examples that came to my mind) while also depressing wages via immigration.
If being Balkan-like is good enough, then yeah I understand why you wouldn't complain. After reading the other comments on this page it seems that "Well, it's good* enough." should be the national Canadian slogan or something.
There are major differences between legal immigrants, who have to pass some pretty strict tests of suitability, and uncontrolled immigration. Legal immigrants have most of the rights and obligations of citizens, including access to healthcare and paying taxes.
> How do you expect illegal immigrants to get to Canada when they only border US?
Canada has thankfully developed enough by now to have airports.
> Canada has thankfully developed enough by now to have airports.
Truly spoken like someone who has no information about illegal immigration. I suppose the border control just lets everyone in? Or flights to Canada just let everyone board without checking their visas? Or Canadian embassies just throw around visas without checking for illegal immigration risk? For those who don't need visas, anyone interested in illegally immigrating from this list of countries (https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...) are much better served by buying a bus ticket to Germany.
> Truly spoken like someone who has no information about illegal immigration
Quote from this [0] article: "But in the past 10 years, visa overstays in the United States have outnumbered border crossings by a ratio of about 2 to 1, according to Robert Warren, who was for a decade the director of the statistics division at the agency that has since been renamed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services".
US and Canada are two entirely different countries with entirely different approaches to immigration, and the numbers are wildly different:
> There are no accurate figures representing the number or composition of undocumented immigrants residing in Canada. A guesstimate of about half a million has been proposed nationally [1, 2], but this number varies among other sources which suggest anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 undocumented workers [3–5]. In 2003, Ontario’s Construction Secretariat purported that there were 76,000 non-status immigrants in Ontario’s construction industry alone, while other sources confirmed that at least 36,000 failed refugee applicants had never been deported, and another 64,000 individuals overstayed their work, student or visitor visas in 2002 [5]. If it is assumed that workers are accompanied by family, the numbers in Ontario would rise to the highest figure previously estimated for all of Canada. With respect to settlement, Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto have the highest number of undocumented migrants [6], with nearly 50% residing in Toronto alone [7].
The total number if illegal immigrants is probably around 10% of the yearly intake of legal immigrants.
First you rudely accuse me of being an ignorant for pointing out that illegal immigration often occurs through airports, and when proven wrong you deflect and try to switch the subject instead of admitting that you were mistaken.
One of the few things we can take solace in as Balkanites: at least it's not as bad as it could be. Thank you US for showing that money does not necessarily fix all your problems.
Yea sure sure but it's significantly worse now that before. As more people become more desperate, they will turn to crime. Canada needs an embodiment of Theseus to defeat the Procrustes like progressives.
>I don’t see as many exploited illegal immigrants in Canada.
There is not a large land border with Mexico in Canada, but Canadians are happy enough to exploit what they call temporary foreign workers who do jobs they don't want to do and have rights which fall short of a citizens on paper and in practice.
This difference seems less due to Canada's superior nature than it seems due to Canada being surrounded by oceans on three sides and by a wealthier country on the fourth side. In fact I think Canadians would do well to keep in mind that they don't face the same issues that other countries do before passing judgement on immigration issues. Almost all immigrants to Canada are immigrants Canada explicitly welcomed to the country who met every qualification.
Well in some cases the gain is mutual especially for things like seasonal agriculture work where demand for labour periodically peaks and the labour is utterly miserable. I've seen seasonal labour wages spike to twice the minimum wage, and still seen fruit rot on the field and people continue working their minimum wage jobs at Tim Hortons. This is an area where the poor of the nation arguably benefit from the underclass by driving down the cost of fresh produce and not having to do this back breaking labour.
For other things, like the aforementioned jobs at Tim Hortons, hiring temporary foreign worker is nothing but a wage suppression scheme meant to solve the "problem" of Tim Horton's being unprofitable and locations shutting down in a low unemployment environment, and the whole "temporary" thing is something to be worked around.
The previous government got in a world of shit for doing the latter and eventually stopped and banned much of the wage suppression aspect of this program. A few years back the incumbent government figured enough people aren't paying attention and re-legalised the fast food underclass again to suppress wages to address the "labour shortage" because fast food workers were faint making more than minimum wage and shudder taking a greater share of the profits of the fast food business.
As a person who has very close familial ties to other countries (US and Europe), and been around a decent bit, I still think life in Canada is better than in other places (for me). Sure we have problems, some of them are getting even worse than before, but comparatively we’re doing okay. It’s easy to say everything sucks here, but it also sucks in other places for different reasons.
Full disclaimer, I consider myself politically moderate/centrist and still think CBC is very valuable. And again, I understand everyone has different priorities in life and Canada might not be suitable for them. But implying “we have it the worst and nobody would want to live here if they had a way to get out” is also wrong.
But isn't perhaps the relatively better life simply due to the truly stupendous ratio of land and natural resources per person that make up for the deficiencies of the system?
Yes. But it's still an objectively better life compared to other places in the world. Hopefully Canada has enough time to correct any system deficiencies before our natural resources run out.
I mean, yeah? Every country uses (if they can) their natural resources to prop up everything. Some better than others (e.g. Norwegian generational fund), some invest basically into every possible thing imaginable (Saudi and Aramco), and Canada does it in just in an average way. Either way, nothing is perfect, things might go for worse, but as of now, it’s a good place for me and others that I know.
There's no government system that has been proposed that can not be captured. The only option that has proven to work so far, is to limit the government, so that regulatory capture doesn't matter that much.
I don't know.. before the tech boom that redefined basic meanings, entrepreneurs were known as folks who were otherwise unemployable. So yes some people start companies because they have a blinding ambition but others do so out of necessity.
Coziness is the biggest hurdle. As a programmer, I can make a really good salary at a tech giant. Even after 4 years of grinding and finally achieving product market fit and growth, my wife doesn't understand why I'm doing a startup. Life could be so much easier working for Google.
Heck everyone has a job here. The 2/1,000 missing entrepreneurs don't have an incentive to start. I'm from Ottawa and all my friends work for the federal government with big fat pensions and doing boring work (my perspective mind you). But they have great family lives, lots of vacation and great outside of work experiences. Why the hell would they jump into entrepreneurship? Worst of all, the government workforce is growing faster than that of the private sector!
What worries me most is the future - a country cannot get wealthier nor innovate without entrepreneurs. It is s a real concern indeed.
Canada is very much a "let someone else do it" kind of place. You see that in politics, you see that in business, you see that in government.
A lot of that though is simply not wanting to be rich. Americans truly want lambo type wealth. I can't say I have met someone born here who wanted that. We are content to own a house and go to Mexico.
I frequently travel to Toronto and the number of people driving Teslas there has increased 10X in the last 5 years. This could be a result of new Chinese money though and not native Canadians.
Many Canadians became wealthy via the housing market. Effectively drawing wealth from the mortgaged future potential income of Canada's young first time home buyers.
Dunno about other cities, but City of Toronto proper didn't add any net new hotel rooms from 2000 - 2015. And only up 22% in the "Greater Toronto Area", which is way less than that area's pop'n growth. I doubt things improved as airbnb became a thing.
USA also has a significant amount of generational wealth to go around. Canadas is isolated to a few dozen families in Montreal and Toronto. Canada is at its core, a resource extraction economy. Generational wealth doesn’t really come from that these days.
But isn't housing ridiculously expensive in the parts of Canada where jobs are concentrated (which I'm pretty sure are around Toronto and Vancouver)? Pardon me if wrong, I'm American ;)
For the record, I want those things too, it's just that housing in California is ridiculously unaffordable
The inefficiency of the Canadian government is nothing to be proud of though. It's insane how many people are employed there compared to doing something productive.
Implying the employees of the federal government aren’t doing something productive? And the Canadian federal government isn’t even that different in size to the American government, accounting for population different.
By having lived there for almost a decade and interacting frequently with the government, many different departments (taxes, immigration, law enforcement, municipalities, various ministries). I don't see what America has to do with it.
What other governments have you interacted with recently?
My experience after living here for 5 years is that the Canadian and BC government deliver an incredible level of service compared to other jurisdictions I’ve lived in.
Just going to toss in my own anecdotes but not so much productive but surprisingly inefficient. My current employer is currently contracted for the federal government and it's painful to do anything.
Just an example, I put in a request to order a $40 network module to replace a failed one. On our side it's already painful enough, I had to get approvals from 3 different managers that have to align all of the budgeting before bringing it forward to the federal government's representative for approval. The rep in tern has to bring it to his bosses for approval as well.
Typically this takes 12 weeks but this was put in as a critical priority because this was impacting about a hundred people. Probably costing the federal government (cause they're footing the bill) about $12,500 a week in lost productivity because our teams can't do their job properly. Thus their director got to it in a blazing fast 4 weeks.
$40 part. $50,000 in lost productivity because they couldn't get a $40 approval for done faster then 4 weeks.
The other anecdote I've had is with the Canadian Firearms Center in Miramichi. For those that are unaware, Canadians are required to be licensed under a federal program to own a firearm privately. Miramichi handles much of the paperwork for firearms registration. This was a while ago but last time I saw, they were still manually entering in data from paperwork but also from electronic submission as well. Stuff that could be readily automated and something I demo'd in an afternoon.
As it turns out, the inefficiency is intentional because there's a very real fear among the line staff of job reductions if they get too productive per person. And there's not many jobs in Miramichi that pay as well as the federal government (or at least that was the case when I was visiting there probably 20 years ago). So unfortunately there is justification to be as inefficient as possible. But it's always left me wondering how much how much further this attitude extends to other government departments.
uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation".
Meanwhile my Canadian tax return is pretty straightforward: open my tax app, click some download function, it pulls in stuff my bank/employer/etc has already electronically submitted to government.
The most annoying part is calculating "Adjusted Cost Basis" for cap gains/losses on stock sales. It's technically fairer than a simpler FIFO approach, but brokers/gov refuse to understand that most people do everything through 1 broker and calculate these figures for us.
It's to the benefit of the parasite to make it easier to feed on its host. It is also to the benefit of the parasite to ensure that its host cannot get rid of it.
Bureaucracy will always seek its own survival, even at the cost of its chartered mission.
Firearms license renewals were at a standstill for over a year because apparently the single license card printer for the entire country was out of order.
> uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation".
Kinda doubt it, there's already a mandatory wait time for getting your license. If anything Ottawa wanted them to process the paper work faster, I just don't know if they could have done so.
Circa early 2000's the Canadians were in the process of trying to get long guns registered (handguns and some other types of firearms always had to be registered), but it turned into a debacle. The cost to build the program should've been $119 million, with fees covering $117 million. The cost that the auditor general found was $140 million registration fees trying to cover $1 billion in costs that she could account for at the time. Didn't help that her team didn't have time to crunch the numbers. CBC went in and estimated that it was closer to $2 billion dollars[2].
The program was already controversial in the first place, but the problems just kept getting problem after problem thrown at it. In protest a man named Brian Richard Buckley sent in firearms registration for a Black and Decker soldering heat gun. There were already huge error rate in the registry at the time; something like 70% error rate of licenses and 90% error rate for registrations but that little stunt he pulled revealed a much deeper problem occurring. I can't find the article anymore but the backlog had become so severe that the staff were instructed to no longer validate any of the information they were getting, even if it didn't make sense.
All that to say that say, if things were being run inefficiently intentionally, that probably would've just given even more opposition even more ammunition to embarrass the government at a time when they were already taking a beating about the mismanagement of the new firearms program. So I sincerely doubt it was a mandate.
It does extend to other departments. I’ve worked alongside entire teams of longtime federal employees who would spend 10 minutes cleaning up and changing out of work gear, drive 5 minutes to the building with a cafeteria, take a 15 minute union mandated break, then spend 5 minutes driving back to a work site, 10 minutes getting back into their gear and readying tools, only to work for 20 more minutes to finish the job at hand. Then get cleaned up, change, put tools away, and drive back to the building just about in time for lunch.
Overall nearly a thousand dollars in salary being wasted in a single morning because the idea of not taking a break at exactly 10:30am instead of finishing the job and taking a break at 11:00am instead is inconceivable.
There is absolutely zero incentive for efficiency and motivated individuals will actually burn out from being in a culture where trying to improve anything or making your colleagues look bad by being too productive creates a toxic work environment.
That’s not to mention the absurd “use it or lose it” budgeting system, whereby if you need to replace a million dollar piece of equipment every 5 years, you need to piss away over a million dollars every year to ensure you’ll have the budget when it’s actually required.
If you think this kind of stuff doesn't happen in private sector tech companies, even after all the layoffs, I've got some bad news for you.
Whenever I see people ragging on governments as though they're automatically inefficient, I laugh because the implication that "private sector is always more efficient" is laughably stupid and ill-informed. People will take their liberties wherever they can get them.
The big difference is that the private sector is burning their own money. If a private company burns their own or their investors money thats on them and they’ll probably go bankrupt sooner or later. Whomever was involved in this will naturally wise up next time.
On the other hand, when public sector burns through money that money isn’t theirs. It was mostly taken away by force through taxes from private citizens. So even of they burn through any money with inefficiency, corruption, bad decision making or anything, they can demand the same or usually more of the same money next year. And next year. All the while that bureaucracy is growing and private sector is shrinking.
>If a private company burns their own or their investors money thats on them and they’ll probably go bankrupt sooner or later.
Sure, but sooner or later is quite likely to be at least a few decades from now, since this is mostly a large organization sort of thing and large companies don't tend to vanish overnight.
That might be true, although some companies pretty much vanish overnight be it small or large (eg Nokia).
If a private company is burning money slow or fast it doesn't really matter. It's their money, it's not my money.
But when I see spectacularly bad/expensive (usually both) projects financed with taxpayer's money, I definitely do want some scrutiny and responsibility. Unfortunately we don't get any of that because it's not in their interest to do so.
That stuff can happen but I've mostly worked at companies where it wasn't like that at all, not even close. And the one exception was a recently privatized ex-government org.
I've worked at two very large tech companies in the past. At both shops I have experiences that make that $50k in lost productivity look like a joke.
First company invested tens if not hundreds of millions chasing the idea of scaled clustered deployment using Spark. I'm sure they saw some kind of technology return but the actual investment was never returned nearly a decade on and turned out to be a blunder.
Second company had a far worse procurement issue than what you describe in your post. $50k in lost productivity would've been welcomed. They had a hardware failure in one of their datacentres affecting the cooling systems. Some customer systems impacted but mostly internal stuff. It took about seven weeks to replace during which time hundreds of employees basically got to twiddle their thumbs.
Yeah, it shouldn't take four weeks to get approval for a $40 part but let's not pretend these kind of problems don't also happen in the private sector too. It's one of the reasons I left and won't go back -- I shouldn't need paperwork signed in triplicate to get a new monitor.
I agree with your point that things may not be more efficient in certain big companies of the private sector but there is a crucial difference between the two.
The difference is that the government's employees are paid from taxes collected from productive companies, aka companies that create jobs and achieve a profit big enough to warrant paying taxes in the first place.
A private sector company, unless it is subsidized in some way or has a monopoly on a certain market will eventually try to rectify these inefficiencies because its makes it more resilient in the fight against it's competitors.
On the other hand, there is no incentive on the government side to make things more efficient.
If a government looses money, they can just borrow more, increase the national debt and sweep any kind of reform under the rug. Because of this lack of incentives, some state and government agencies act as de facto subsidized job's programs.
It's the same problem in many western nation, just look at how many people are employed in France by the government.
Many basic services are actually decaying but the government keeps hiring more people.
If we remove the employees who work as teachers, cops, in the military, and all other essential services, the rest of them, I am just not sure what the hell they do with their time.
My point is that it should be a duty of the government to be as efficient as possible. To do more with less, should be a priority unless the tasks require more people.
So I can understand when people complain of the inefficiency of a government agency.
Not saying that it doesn't happen in the private sector. But companies that are stuck on inertia and don't adapt, don't tend to fare particularly well. IBM was one of the most powerful companies in the world, now it's just a laughable shell of it's former self. Microsoft had it's time in the sun before the shift to mobile devices and cloud service gutted it's hold over over the computing space and left them scrambling to try to adapt to the world today. At some point or another it will be Google and Apple's turn to fall from the throne as technology marches on.
The public sector is insulated from suffering that kind of failure. In some ways it's good; there's no real way to run a police or military force at a profit, but both are vital. But in other ways it's problematic when major failures occur and the consequences of such are are just shrugged off.
What are you talking about? Coziness? Are you one of those people you bought a house in the 2010s and are now well positioned to cash in and live a life of comfort with 500$ mortgages while homes out there are near a million dollar. Because then it would make sense.
Problem with Canada is the cost of living is too high. And there is more money if you move south. Easy. A job in US would easily pay you twice if you are in tech. Why would you want to live in Canada? Oh did I say the taxes. For a millennial,ife is way more harder.
Plenty of affordable homes in Canada at the $500,000 mortgage + down payment range. Go find a smaller city and grow with it because you have the same affordability problem in San Francisco or New York. Your tech salary isn't getting you a house there either. The time to buy a house in Toronto was when they cost $5,000 after the war or was the time to buy in 1975 when the property cost $30,000 or in the 90s when you could have gotten a house for $200,000. In 2012 for $500,000 you could get a house in 2021 it was 1.3 million now it's 1.1 million. In 2015 you could have purchased a home in New Brunswick for $25,000..
Your 1.1 million dollar home you buy today will be worth 5 million in 50 years at least 2 million in 20 years. Still as good of an investment as ever.
It's like bitcoin sure it would have been great buying coins for 5 cents and today and you would be a billionaire but you weren't able to make that bet. If you want to buy at the 5 cent level you need to find another coin because that opportunity passed. You weren't able to buy a home in 2010 or 1947 so you are never getting those prices again. You can buy today but don't expect the same prices on the same properties as if you lived in the past
yeah, but in 1975 the average household income was 50k. Now its 92k. The cost of a house in Toronto (and everywhere in Ontario) went from being 60k (120% of annual average family income) to 1.1m (1200% annual average family income).
"Go somewhere else" - They did that - and Halifax housing prices tripled in 3 years, from 310% annual average family income to 840% annual average family income.
We need to build more houses or have fewer people, but instead we're slowing down on building and importing new people as fast as we can
Someone who says the solution to the housing problem is to move somewhere horrible with no jobs, no culture, no services, horrible schools so that my children can waste their future, never mind if I want to go out and do something one in a while. These places are so awesome that the depression and suicide rates are far higher than in real cities.
Maybe you like living in such places. But the solution to the housing crisis cannot be to give up on having a reasonable life for most people.
> Someone who says the solution to the housing problem is to move somewhere horrible with no jobs
The stated solution was always to move to where the jobs are. Perhaps counterintuitively, the trouble with high housing prices is that even the job providers don't want to live there. In fact, through the mid-to-late 2010s as Vancouver and Toronto became unmanageable, the strongest job market in Canada was in a predominantly rural area with an average home price of $200,000.
The trouble is that people eventually take notice, so it is always a moving target. The average home in that rural region is now $700,000 as people have pushed their way in to bask in the job opportunity. Which, of course, also means the job market is no longer as strong (although remains stronger than a lot of country according to September data – the decline takes time) as job providers have started moving to more prosperous ground again. You can't say "move to <location>, problem solved" because as soon as you do, <location> will necessarily need to change to somewhere else.
A story as old as time, of course. Canada wouldn't exist at all if people weren't always needing to find a new location. That is life, I suppose.
You want to live in the top cities but you want mid city prices? Toronto wasn't always top city. It was known as hogtown and when people feared Quebec leaving Canada in the 1970s many in Montreal moved to Toronto. Vancouver wasn't an expensive city until China took over Hong Kong and many moved to Vancouver. Today many smaller cities are popping and posed for growth.
The culture argument is biased. People leaving Montreal for hogtown in the 80s probably felt the same way. But Toronto's cultural aura grew. Saying that the culture of say Miramichi or Yellowknife is horrible and your kids future will be wasted if you don't live in downtown Toronto is a little naive.
Young people are flocking to smaller towns because of affordability. Culture is being made there. Why do you want to live with older folks and try to relive there heyday in places they made big?
For jobs. Stick to remote. The longer these in person positions go vacant the more likely they become remote jobs. Be part of the solution.
Small cities usually don't become cosmopolitan cultural centers in the span of a lifetime. So growing with a small city with the plan of living there long term isn't viable.
Growing with a small city as an investment vehicle seems like it would run into problems predicting which small city is going to see significant growth.
> Plenty of affordable homes in Canada at the $500,000 mortgage + down payment range.
Canadian humor is weird.
Using the most typical US salary as a guide, it would require the combined salaries of 6.3 people to afford a $500k home. After adding insurance, maintenance, fees, property taxes, etc - I'm thinking more like 8 people (10 in FL).
Even that $500,000 would be a steal in most markets in canada. The average house price is about 780,000 across the country and $900,000 in Ontario the most populous province.
If houses were just 500,000 and there were jobs in those areas I think we WOULD see more entrepreneurs because that was pretty much the conditions 10 years ago that TFA mentioned
I don’t know about Canada, but there’s also no unemployment safety net in China, which drives a lot of “neighbourhood” businesses (hairdressers, AirBnb, milk tea shops, etc).
- 2010 mortgages are not that low, unless you bought a travel trailer
- $1million actually doesn't buy you much in Toronto, Vancouver, or even a smaller city like Victoria
- a millennial working at big tech ($200k+) can still afford one of these absurdly priced homes
Yes housing in Canada is messed up. But very well paid tech workers are actually some of the few young people that can still make it work.
Heck, I know some millennials that managed to buy in the Bay Area where it's even worse (they work at Tesla).
Oh so now the millions in Canada all they need to do is to work in big tech. I see. Problem solved. Thanks for enlightening me. I am so glad I left that messed up country filled with “we made it our own and you can too” people.
Just to give you context, median software Engineer salary in Canada is 95200. An average townhome in any of the cities now is over 600k easily, forget about Toronto and Vancouver where most likely those tech jobs are. Mortgage for a place like this in the current rate is easily around 2500-3000. Add in car, insurance, electricity, cost of daycare. And then see how much of after tax income can you afford to bring home.
> Coziness is the biggest hurdle. As a programmer, I can make a really good salary at a tech giant.
I'm in no way implying that requiring a big tech salary is a _good_ thing (obviously it's not).. I'm simply agreeing with the original statement that it stifles startups.
1 in every 4 people work for the Gov in Ontario and it is increasing. An elementary school teacher, fireman, Police officer and even some postal workers make more than most programmers. HS teachers retired with million dollar pension at 57 and collect 60-70k a year. There are regular cops making 120k a year. There are more STEM jobs in some US cities than there are in entire provinces. There is no work in Canada unless you find a Gov job. Private industry pays like shit in Canada, it's embarrassing. Everyone I know flees to the US first chance they get. Canadian private industry pays like shit and most folks are either slaves or under employed if they are lucky enough to find work.
It is an incredibly bad situation across the entire country.
> Coziness is the biggest hurdle. As a programmer, I can make a really good salary at a tech giant. Even after 4 years of grinding and finally achieving product market fit and growth, my wife doesn't understand why I'm doing a startup. Life could be so much easier working for Google.
If this was a major factor then it would also apply to entrepreneurs in the US, yet it doesn't.
There are a lot of engineers in big tech in the bay area who would start a company if not for their 6-700k (or more in some cases) salaries. I personally know many and they are making a completely rational choice.
People don't make decisions in a vacuum. They make decisions amongst a set of choices.
Same problem with the imperial exam Keju[1] in China. It would recruit all talent for the state leaving civil society resourceless. The examination path to a government official position was more attractive than being a farmer, scholar or soldier.
> Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary toil …
We can see its effects in the long run: promoting conformity at any cost, losing ability to innovate and improve.
I would suggest that 20 years ago life was far more affordable for the average person, such that it was more conducive to risk taking for personal gain. Today, everything is so damn expensive (housing being the most obvious, but really everything) that taking a few years out of your life to try to start a business feels like a massively riskier proposition in that those are years you’d otherwise be making money to ideally save for a house down payment which keeps getting farther and farther away even while working (in some areas of the GTA, house prices were increasing on average by $80k/month).
I run a Canadian tech startup here. Funding to get going is of course an issue. The BDC (referenced in this article) is just another bank and have zero means to help a SaaS getting started.
We turned to the US to get funding (besides our own money). TinySeed specializes in boostrapped B2B SaaS. They have an incubator program that is really good and got us going.
We're at the point of getting a line of credit and again have to deal with Canadian banks. Again the BDC cannot help more than any other bank.
We also looked at government tech subsidies and grants. Honestly, there is so much paperwork that takes time away from gaining customers and growing the business. We did not pursue.
Maybe when you reach 20+ staff these things will come to help you. Especially if you have someone to manage it. But when you get started, you're on your own.
Back when I worked at a Canadian startup and had to do SRED paperwork I got the vibe that it was more about companies that could afford to hire SRED consultants than it was actual research and dev. Heard stories about web dev / media shops milking SRED, while I saw people doing actual foundational engineering struggle (nor could they waste the time filling in the paperwork).
This was over a decade ago. Did not come away with a positive impression of the tech startup scene in Canada. Yours and other comments since have only fed that.
... I want to disagree with this, but it lines up with my own experience. My work was being presented for similar grants with very flimsy justifications. Not pure web work but it wasn't exactly foundational research either.
I too have seen this as a past entrepreneur in Canada. A lot of accountants are in on misrepresenting SR&ED tax credit applications and will attempt to find the "research" in regular IT work. They will even do the technical writing and filing work for free, while taking a commission of the take when the tax credits roll in (free money). There is a whole segment of startups propped up by SR&ED. I've seen many doing innovative work with a sound business plan, using that money to get to profitability, and it's great they were able to get funding, but a lot of others milked the system fraudulently, using SR&ED consultants to continue to exist when they should have failed.
> We also looked at government tech subsidies and grants. Honestly, there is so much paperwork that takes time away from gaining customers and growing the business.
I wonder how that compares with, for example, joining an YC batch, or talking to multiple VCs in search of financing
Don’t you need hundreds of thousands of dollars to become an entrepreneur? Or millions? I mean buying a place to do business alone is crazy, real estate is so expensive. I would start with that if I was wondering why people aren’t starting businesses. Is the money there? You can’t educate yourself into three hundred thousand dollars. Seems like the first obvious place to look.
BDC from the article is a bank – owned by the government of Canada that exclusively lends to entrepreneurs. They have the money needed for someone to become an entrepreneur. What is missing is people with a vision to use that money. The idea they are presenting, right or wrong[1], is that educating yourself can produce the missing vision.
[1] Probably wrong as Canada is considered, according to the OECD, the most educated nation in the world.
These explanations are all very interesting, but the reality is that any good business person must decide when to invest. The conditions have been far from favourable for years in Canada. Real estate is simply too expensive. Sure commercial real estate for the plant or office or whatever facility you need is outrageously expensive, but then, when you wanted to hire somebody or try, they need to pay rent or a mortgage. People aren’t demanding outrageous wages because they suddenly think they’re worth it. They just know how expensive it is to pay the bills and groceries.
Government policy, both the conservatives and the liberals, are very cosy to large corporations. Most of their announcements, that supposedly help small businesses are simply far out of reach due to requirements for revenue or number of employees, and is essentially corporate welfare. The BDC and EDC are a joke, both crown corporations run by people very disconnected from any sort of reality.
Of course it was driven by interest rates, but the insidious thing about interest rate is it allows zombie corporations. These organizations that should’ve gone out of business being acquired or shut down, but because of their size and revenue were able to continue to borrow more and more and more money at extremely low interest rates. of course it’s coming to an end now as financial reality hits. Many of these companies are forced to cut, but they were actually hopelessly dysfunctional so over time though finally either just be bought or go to business.
all of this to say, the last 20 years has been a terrible time to start a business in Canada but a lot of markers are indicating things could be getting better soon. While it may be good for somebody starting a business isn’t good for necessarily the average person.
anyway, the thing I find absolutely laughable is that we need more education for entrepreneurs. The funniest thing I’ve read all year. there is no education that will make someone an entrepreneur, but someone may learn enough to be scarred out of taking the plunge.
finally, the idea that there’s a single definition of Canadians is completely stupid and misinformed. culture varies dramatically from coast to coast and from the south to the north. if someone thinks that nobody wants to work, or nobody wants to make money, it speaks about the people that they associate with not the country they live in. I think that is true most anywhere.
Yours is the most reasoned comment here, thank you. And you're right to point the finger at both major parties.
While I agree that there's no single definition of Canadian, I do think there's a particular Canadian sickness that seems to think that policy that benefits and protects existing established interests is good policy.
Example: local rural zoning laws here in Hamilton area were being revisited some years ago. I live on a small farm so went to the sessions and read the documents, etc. And I have an interest in the wine industry, so noticed that in the bylaws they went out of their way to explicitly forbid winery development in any area but an area east of the city (towards Niagara.) Why? When I asked the zoning officer at a public meeting, she just stared at me blankly: "Because that's where the wineries already are."
She wasn't corrupt. She wasn't stupid. She didn't care about the issue. But the thought that you might want to craft regulation in such a way to leave things open for new entrants and possibilities was ... confusing to her. But why would you close off a whole agricultural area to new developments like that? I don't get the mindset, but I see it all the time. Maybe because we're so used to being squashed by the US that we feel we have to protect the successes that we have? Bizarrely though we have very intense internal protectionism.
I see examples of this all over the place. From Alberta's recent moves against the burgeoning renewable energy sector, to Ontario wine regulations, to the way the telecomms sector is run nationally, to the way grants and incubators etc are set up.
Canada is captured by real estate investors, bureaucrats, and the Century Initiative [0]. So rather than developing national infrastructure and tier 2/3 markets across this giant landmass (like China) to create affordable places to incubate entrepreneurship, they ramp up immigration into "mega-regions" driving up living costs, making everyone risk averse and entrepreneurship untenable.
> would-be entrepreneurs face a barrage of discouraging factors, such as labour shortages, inflation, technological change and the increasing domination of large companies.
More likely ever-increasing taxes, mandates, lawsuits and crushing regulations.
Difficult and complicated to get funding, insanely high rent, Canadian banks and telcos are stuck in the Stone Age, and the government bureaucracy is impotent and moves at a snail’s pace.
Or we move to America and earn twice as much money.
I know the cost of living is now a standard excuse for everything unfortunate in Canada, but I have an untypical view on this topic:
Canadians strike me as a very undemanding nation. I mean, they are ready to go through whatever inconvenience a big corp may force them into, and still be fine about it. To Canadians, it's just the way things are, inevitable evil. At the same time, an entrepreneur frequently starts by targeting a market niche and offering better quality or better service or a novel way of doing things. However, a market niche assumes that there are consumers with a niche demand. But if consumers are undemanding and are OK with keeping paying for something subpar, this leaves us with not so many market niches and thus opportunities.
At the same time, doing business is great in Canada. The tax system is simple (just 3 taxes). Reduced tax rates for small businesses. Registering a business can be done online for a small fee. The banks are OK. Abundance of decent business-related services - accountants, designers, etc. It's relatively easy to sell to the government. Finding a good lawyer is a tough problem, though. But I suspect it's a problem everywhere.
I totally agree with the “undemanding Canadians” view…so true! I moved here 12 years ago from Dubai and the demands/standards of business and service are way lower here. Pros are that it’s laid back and chill, cons are that we are unlikely to lead and innovate because we are satisfied with the status quo
The vibe I get too often in Canada is services (public and private) exist to employ workers, not to provide services, and it's pervasive. As as service consumer you are expected to enthusiastically go along with this cost on your existence, and the scary thing is most people do. This leads to the problem that no matter how much money you would throw at getting something done you will only be able to get what someone else wants to do, regardless of what you are paying for.
They are also undemanding of their government, having reelected the same government many years in a row now. The whole undemanding culture is pointing them to a direction of uniformity, which I guess would equate to more monopolies and less innovation and entrepreneurship.
Left or right, the Canadian government serves business not individuals and it shows everywhere. There is only ONE independent ISP left in Ontario and they have recently been talking to law firms who specialize in the sale of businesses. That leaves Bell, Rogers and Cogeco as the only way you can get a home phone, cell phone or internet connection. Most places you have only one option for your electrical and natural gas provider!
Canada is just 3 monopolies in a trench coat and there is nothing we can do about it.
I mean, if the government wants to buy something from you they do it relatively easily. You don't have to persuade them for months and years as frequently expected in enterprise sales. They just request a quota (RFQ), send a PO, and then pay the invoice. No elaborate RFPs or endless bidding processes.
Of course, it's not always like that. But in my experience such simplified purchases were sufficiently frequent to (pleasantly) surprise me.
I'd mention something, but I see you've already invited a giant white elephant, which has its trunk wound around the handle of an "affordable housing" sign.
The grand theories in this thread about Canada's national character, its housing prices, its tax rates, etc etc. The descent of Canada's tech industry has moved in lockstep with the ascent of the internet, and good internet access depends on good telecom companies, and Canada has none. Canada's telecom monopoly stabbed the country's future to death with a rusty awl.
This article is such a load of BS (bar couple of sound points). I particularly love parts where they imply that putting people into hardship (pay less and fire mor) is a potential solution. Those fuckers should just lead by the example rather than getting salaries for spreading lies. Start your own successful business and then you can talk.
> The Crown corporation says the decline puts the economy in danger, and it worked with researchers from the Université de Montréal to analyze the problem and what's causing it, and to consider solutions. Its recommendation: Some of the difficulties of entrepreneurship can be overcome by helping business owners develop "soft skills," such as grit, marketing and how to interact with people
I wonder if they're self aware about how dumb their suggestions sound. If all it took was some sort skills, then everyone would be starting businesses left and right.
Or because they're paid to say something. And that needs to be easily and individually actionable.
> and found that the country has 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs than it did 20 years ago — despite the fact that the population has grown by more than 10 million over the same period.
Canada is a bit below 39M people. In 2003 it was above 31M. The growth is decidedly less than 10M.
But yes, support for entrepreneurs is nonexistent, my little company (not even reaching 1M CAD a year in revenue) is controlled by the same rules on paper as SNC-Lavalin (except of course if they break the rules the prime minister fires the minister of justice to avoid prosecution but if I am late with a report a few days I get fined). Many European countries have simple flat taxes with minimal administration.
2. Bureaucracy has barriers for everyone except monopolies, and prefers monopolies as it's less groups to negotiate with. (A significant amount of said bureaucracy is private industry, but yes, most public qualifies too).
3. Internet access is controlled by a small group of monopolies who manage to (largely) keep access costs above anywhere else in the world, largely - and definitely higher than most of the USA.
4. Shipping is largely controlled by either US monopolies that aren't reliable, safe or consistent, or Canada Post who's been eroded repeatedly by Canadian Conservatives favouring their US friends.
5. US protectionism results in some businesses - especially supplies - either being shut down or bought up and moved US-side or the like. This one goes back a long ways, but Conservatives provincially and federally have escalated it every chance they have.
In short - if your business idea requires a storefront, you're likely paying 2-10x housing rent (or more), and your home will be 2-10x what it was renting for 1-3 years ago. Business rents go up arbitrarily without any ability to negotiate (as the people renting out control it). Household rent goes up arbitrarily, largely due to same. While I've not seen direct proof, there are signs most real estate is either owned by foreign (eg USA based or other) for (artificially inflated) investment, tax evaders or money launderers.
Canadian real estate isn't worth the price attached almost anywhere - especially when one qualifies that outside of some specific areas, it's colder than most other places in the world.
At the end of the day it's still possible, but if I could find a path to get a simple product to market without being swamped by amazon (and its cartels of forgers and thieves - most third party) or similar across other markets ... I would have long ago.
There's one more cost of entry - NIMBYism and city zoning. This is a subtle one - it means one has a lot of barriers against opening a business out of a home unless strictly mail order. This was established a long time ago...
Canada has all the issues and none of the advantages of the US market 10 times its size.
Real-estate securitization has DoS’d key class 5 to 7 zones. This means empty industrial buildings stay empty, as the tax-deductions on inflated-valuations are also used to underwrite more debt... worth more than any lease sucker deal. Try to convince a competent CEO a small $32k/month triple-net lease isn’t going to bleed an inexperienced company into receivership eventually.
Pick just about any US state, hire 30 locals, and making a profit gets so much easier. The US financial ecosystem is generally far more harmonious even to type C corporations.
As an outsider in unregulated markets, one could see Corporate sponsored prostitution, targeted bribery, and blackmail. You just aren't important enough if you don't know these facts yet.
Canada has some of the silliest smart people in the world =)
> For its report, BDC defined an entrepreneur as a self-employed worker who hires employees to support their venture.
Perhaps what has actually changed in the last 20 years is that, thanks to technical advancement, a need for employees has declined – not that fewer people are taking on business operational risk as entrepreneur is more typically defined?
For example, I operate three different businesses in Canada, but only one of them hires employees.
Maybe it's simply about concentration? Fewer entrepreneurs but they are bigger - because in digital economy, things scale better, thus there are fewer, bigger winners.
Competent and "cultural fit" people in Canada are not only drawn to the US by higher wages, but they are actively pushed out of Canada by a system that does not value them.
I was in a city grant committee in a community in Canada.
Most of the committee was happy to dole out funding for arts projects.
I was the only one that advocated for funding an entrepreneur program, and reasoning that funding future entrepreneurs will create the funding for art’s grant was lost on the progressives.
Maybe I've just become more aware of the origins of the products I buy, but I have encountered a lot of Canadian things lately: Apollo electric scooter, Fluance sound system, 1Password service, Zealios keyboard switches, etc... I don't go out of my way to buy Canadian made things, it just seems like they are everywhere.
The other is rents have increased that whole time, who can afford to be an entrepreneur when your lease will eat you alive before you ever get off the ground. If the argument is “aha - but Canadians could start an innovative company that relies on remote work and thus avoid such expensive leases” what is the appeal of starting such a business in Canada compared to starting one in the United States where success is far more likely due to a larger market and more pro-business environment?
Finally inequality and monopolization is just much worse than 20 years ago internationally. Why be David fighting Goliath when the deck is stacked against you? I’d be kind of surprised if the trend in the article isn’t happening internationally.
The articles suggestion that Canadians just don’t have good enough soft skills to be entrepreneurs is just insulting blaming of non-existent individual deficits that ignores systemic issues.
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