BRAIN REGAIN
Canadian tech jobs attracting Americans
Canada is used to worrying about the country’s brightest minds in tech leaving for Silicon Valley, but lately, the job applications have been heading north of the border instead.
A July survey of Canadian highgrowth firms conducted by Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District found 62 per cent of respondents have noticed a recent significant increase in job applications from the United States. MaRS sent the survey to 42 companies it believed would have exposure to such jobseekers; 18 companies reported an increase, 11 reported no relevant increase and 13 declined to respond.
Ottawa-based e-commerce platform Shopify Inc. reported receiving 40 per cent more applications from the U.S. in the first quarter of 2017 than it did during an average quarter in 2016. ThinkData Works Inc., an open data company, reported a 50 per cent increase in U.S.-based applications on average in 2017 compared with the previous year and twice as many foreign applicants overall.
“This is remarkable for a modestly funded seed-stage startup,” said Lara Torvi, a spokeswoman for MaRS, in an email.
Members of Canada’s tech community have been predicting this would happen since U.S. President Donald Trump’s election in November. The Canadian tech industry has been marketing itself as a friendlier alternative for immigrants, many of whom feel unwelcome in the U.S. given Trump’s public statements and policy stances.
In January, 150 people from Canada’s leading tech companies and accelerators published an open letter denouncing an executive order from Trump barring travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Trump has also pledged to restrict a special American visa program known as H-1B that allows foreigners to work or run businesses in the U.S. and is heavily used by the tech industry.
Toronto-based digital medical image company Figure 1 had twice as many U.S.-based applicants for a senior role posted in January 2017 than it did for a similar position posted in January 2016.
In addition to the increase in such applicants at his company, Figure 1 chief executive Gregory Levey said he’s noticed more U.S. investors and Silicon Valley heavyweights making trips to Canada.