The ‘brain drain’ — fact or fiction?

The “brain drain” of Canada’s research and medical elite attracted rampant speculation in the 1990s, with pundits blaming everything from high taxes to shoddy facilities. But did the brain drain actually exist?

In 2000, Statistics Canada analysts published research examining the migration of knowledge workers in the preceding decade in an attempt to answer that question. The result was a lot more complicated than the blaring headlines.

Who left?

25% Of the supply of newly graduated doctors, a full quarter left for the U.S. in 1996-97, about 450 in total. Canada lost 4% of its university graduates in engineering in 1995 and 1% of its natural scientists.

49% The leavers were desirable, highly educated workers: nearly half of the adult Canadians who migrated to the U.S. between 1994 and 1999 had a university degree, compared to 12% of the general Canadian-born population. They were also richer than most: 1996 Canada-to-U.S. emigrants were seven times more likely to report incomes of more than $150,000.

2:1 The knowledge exchange was uneven, with double the number of post-secondary faculty who moved from Canada to the U.S. compared to the other direction. According to data from what is now Universities Canada, senior professors were more likely to leave the country than to move between provinces.

Who came?

15x However, between the mid-1980s and 1997, the immigration to Canada of computer scientists — a particularly coveted skill set — increased 15-fold; engineers increased 10-fold and natural scientists increased eightfold.

2x According to the 1996 census, recent immigrants to Canada were twice as likely as the Canadian-born population to be working as computer scientists, engineers or natural scientists. They were also twice as likely to have a university education, and even more likely to hold an advanced degree (a master’s degree or doctorate).

4:1 The number of university graduates who entered Canada in the 1990s outnumbered those who left for the U.S. by a ratio of about four to one; 39,000 degree-holders entered Canada per year between 1990 and 1996, while an estimated 10,000 per year left for the U.S. So while a disproportionate number of highly desirable workers left Canada for the U.S. in that decade, Canada enjoyed a net gain in skilled labour.

What about now?

35% The annual number of individuals who left Canada to live in the U.S. dropped from 113,100 in 2000 to 73,000 in 2006. The number had been rising steadily between 1986 and 2000.

1.7 In 2001, for every one individual leaving the U.S. for Canada, there were 2.2 moving the opposite way; by 2006, that number had dropped to 1.7.

10% Health professionals are still overrepresented in the Canadian diaspora living stateside, representing 10% of Canadians there, versus 5% here. Among the diaspora in the U.S., the percentage of Canadians in professional, scientific and technical services careers also rose slightly, from 12% in the ’90s to 14% between 2000 and 2006.

21% About one-fifth of all 2005 doctoral graduates intended to leave Canada after completing their degree and more than half of those planned to move to the United States. Yet more than eight out of 10 graduates said they intended to return. Two years after graduation, a quarter of those who had left for the U.S. had returned, and the majority still said they planned to do so. Kate Allen