Canada’s tech industry is warning that the country continues to lose its best and brightest entrepreneurs to the U.S., an issue that has taken on new urgency as tariff threats have prompted Ottawa to try to diversify away from the U.S. economy.
This week, various tech entrepreneurs, politicians and economists began to weigh in on data that show just how big the problem has become. According to recent figures, there are at least 517 U.S.-based tech firms with Canadian founders — or, entrepreneurs who were educated in Canada but later left for the U.S. — that have together raised more than US$400 billion.
“The numbers make it clear that Canada’s founders and entrepreneurs are leaving in droves — and they are taking the future value they will generate with them,” said Lucy Hargreaves, co-founder of the business advocacy group Build Canada, who issued a call to action in the form of a LinkedIn essay that triggered an online conversation about the trend.
Children criticize the source, intelligent adults address the content. Was there something about the content that you disagreed with?
Yes. I don’t care about “entrepreneurs”.
Then you don’t care about Canadian jobs because the vast majority of jobs come from small and medium business in Canada. Those are the entrepreneurs
Let’s deconstruct this.
Do you have a number about how many people work for Canadian entrepreneurs?
Which of them are the ones threatening to leave?
What percentage of people work for these ones?
Are they really gonna leave or are they just posturing?
I dgaf if some techbro that employs 5 people leave. The real Canadian entrepreneurs that want to help build a strong Canada won’t be so fickle.
1 approximately 5.8 million people, which accounts for 46.6% of the total private labour force. That’s not including medium sized businesses which grew from small businesses
2 a lot of them apparently, something like 40% in the trades involving manufacturing and such but for this particular article they’re referring to the tech industry which is lost about $400 billion dollars worth. That’s quite a lot
3 None, they left. The question is how many would have worked for them and the answer is thousands and thousands
4 The article notes that these are the ones that have already left. We don’t know how many more considering Leaving but presumably these ones left others will follow. We do know that several other sectors such as manufacturing, are reporting that many are planning to leave or have already made arrangements.
We’re talking about a very large number of jobs and massive amounts of investment money, and not just that but these are extremely high paying jobs. And as I’m sure you are aware these kinds of high-paying jobs and stimulate other jobs within the economy as well
We can’t afford to be losing high paying tech jobs and replacing them with Tim Hortons jobs. This is a big deal, we have to make it desirable for companies both tech and other to stay in Canada and right now we’re not achieving that