Tech Workers - Come to Canada

It's clear that the Toronto and Southern Ontario tech scene is booming, even in the middle of the recession caused by the pandemic. If you want to see just how lively it is, check out the BetaKit site, which covers news about Canadian startups and tech innovation.  

There are many reasons for this, not the least of them being the anti-immigration policies of the current US regime. Wired looks at this in more detail in this article.

But there's a new global winner: Canada, and particularly Toronto. Since 2013, the tech scene there has grown faster than in any other North American city. In 2017, Toronto added more tech jobs than Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington, DC, combined; in 2018 (the most recent year for which numbers are available), the city was second only to the Bay Area in new tech jobs. Toronto is so crammed with immigrants that nearly 50 percent of all residents were born outside the country.

“I call it our secret sauce,” says Humera Malik, founder of Canvass Analytics, which creates AI that helps factories monitor their machinery and processes. Malik, who is from Pakistan, hired over three-quarters of her firm's engineers from abroad, including Iran, Singapore, and India.

What happened? For one thing, Silicon Valley, now a victim of its own success, is unlivably expensive. Toronto is cheaper. There is also Toronto's pull factor: It has become a global AI hub because it's the home of deep-learning pioneers like Geoff Hinton at the University of Toronto—and “brilliance attracts brilliance,” notes Garth Gibson, head of the city's Vector Institute, which supports AI in academe and industry.

But this is also a story of the US actively chasing away immigrants. The system can be laborious to navigate (Yuan's application was denied eight times before he got in). And it's gotten harder. Donald Trump began his road to the White House by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and then banned travelers from Muslim countries as one of his first presidential acts. This summer, to the horror of Silicon Valley, he suspended H-1B visas for the rest of the year. He proposed, and then under pressure retracted, rules making it nigh impossible for foreign students to remain in the country during the pandemic.

I'm not surprised. About a decade ago, I had a line on a senior technical writing job in Silicon Valley, via a friend. It would have paid me more than double what I was making at the time. But I couldn't afford to live there, especially taking the cost of US health care into account. Yes, I would have had a good health plan through my prospective employer, but what would happen if I lost my job? That's not something I've ever had to worry about here in Canada. I stayed here and I have no regrets.