Not a single company I interviewed with was willing to even come close to US salaries. Everyone I know from school who's any good at all has already left for SF/Seattle/NYC and I'll probably be joining them soon.

I'm not sure how these Canadian companies expect to retain great talent when just across the border, developers can make more money after deducting all living expenses + taxes, than the entire pre-tax salary they're offering.

I actually get paid more here in Toronto than I could hope to get in London.

My only option for the US is H1B but I'm willing to stick around for a while and I'll consider my options when I'm Canadian.

[1] - https://medium.com/@benjilanyado/an-open-letter-to-ed-vaizey...

I myself have no motivation to move to the USA. The increase in salary would be accompanied by a personal (stress on the personal aspect) loss in quality of life. Overall motivations for me staying in the Netherlands are cultural (the mindsets of Europeans are far closer to my own), environmental (sane cycling routes, pedestrian accessible city centers, high quality public transport), and ease of travel to a variety of interesting holiday locations. The difference between Canada and the US is not even close to the difference between Canada and the Netherlands, so you can infer my willingness to move home to small town Nova Scotia. If you cannot compete on salaries you have to compete on something else but what is that going to be? Universal health care and high quality public education are not unique to Canada and probably not the highest interest of people we are considering.

How exactly is anyone helped by money taking a round trip through the government rather than the same thing happening through free markets? You've made the cycle slower, you've made the recipients dependent on government bureaucratic decisions (who are not well-incentivized to decide well), and have reduced incentives for efficiency. And you've gained nothing.

Don't get me wrong. Government has important roles to play in our economy and society. We need government to create basic infrastructure, create regulations encouraging public goods, provide a stable system of law, and so on. But unless you are serving some legitimate purpose, channeling daily economic activity through the government is a net loss compared to doing the same through private enterprise.

Quebec being full of people who believe that the economy should go through the government seems to be its second largest economic mistake, and one it is still making on a large scale. People like you complain about the predictable results of this mistake, but don't see that it is a mistake.

Quebec's largest mistake was, of course, Bill 101. That made your province so hostile to anglophones that 1/3 of them "voluntarily emmigrated" within a few years. (The ones I know are inclined to dispute how voluntary that emmigration was...) They took with them the headquarters of many major companies, the associated jobs, and the general economic activity that would have come from those professionals spending locally. This is why, for example, The Bank of Montreal is now headquartered in Toronto.

There is a collective blind spot in Quebec to the true cost of this for your society. Major companies need to have a stream of professionals moving to their headquarters from elsewhere because that is how you move up in the hierarchy. If you have made professionals unwilling to move to Quebec (for instance by forcing their children to receive education in a language they don't speak), companies have to choose between moving headquarters or losing their most valued employees to competitors.

It proved to be cheaper to move headquarters. And they did. Quebec's economy has never recovered from this. (Though you did adjust your ethnic ratio by enough that you nearly managed to get a 50% vote to secede in the 90s...)

My impression is that if you lowered the income tax in Quebec (much higher then Ontario), most probably more professionals would be willing to work there, english or french or any other language.

I agree with your statement of "Quebec being full of people who believe that the economy should go through the government".

But after a year living there I left - 100% due to the hostility to strictly English-speaking people.

I hoped my lack of french-speaking ability would only be a minor hurdle that I could slowly overcome as I grasped the language over the years. But every single store you go into requires that they start speaking in french first (a bylaw). I watched three major street protests while walking downtown against stores who didn't change their globally-recognized retail brand names to french versions.

Plus I felt a large cliquey nature to the Montreal tech scene. I felt like a foreigner in my own country. I was happy to go back to Toronto where multiculturalism is actually fully embraced. Where almost everyone still speaks their native language first, often remaining in cultural divided in neighbourhoods, and despite this mixing at bars and events is never an uncomfortable experience.

Quebec's greatest economic problem is their obsession with cultural homogeneity.

I always thought Quebec's problem were with the it's socialist approach and how taxed Quebecers are, thus professionals flocked away, but your experience has made me realize a different reality. I guess we aren't as welcoming if you're not french ... ?

Or feeling the hostility of older Quebecers who think I'm just another anglophile who didn't spend the time to learn their language. I heard many people casually complain about the American kids who came to the universities and never tried to speak french.

Before arriving I heard lots of rumours about how Quebec people aren't friendly and I was quick to ignore this as a stereotype. But going to many tech events I found it difficult to network. The image that has stuck in my mind of these occasions is finding many small tightnit groups of people packed together at bars or venues, who seemed to have known each other for years, and seemingly disinterested in the people around them.

I never experienced that in Toronto or SF.

> I always thought Quebec's problem were with the it's socialist approach and how taxed Quebecers are

Bringing up Quebec in Toronto (which came up often moving there) the first thing people talk about is the people's attitudes, not socalism. I've actually never heard people talk about their socialist tendencies outside of the news. The only political stereotype that came up was that the tendency of Quebec people to complain about the government not giving them enough money/support, while simultaneously not contributing as much as Ontario economically.

I'm curious what changed?

That said, Montréal is a great city and I'm actually considering moving back, despite the dramatic drop in income.

Nope. The almost won referendum was in 1995. The referendum that wasn't close was 1980. Bill 101 was 1977.

The Bank of Montreal announced its move in 1977.

(I'm aware of this because I had several classmates in high school whose families had moved from Quebec. They were extremely clear that they moved because of Bill 101, not because of the referendum.)

No, no, Quebec's largest mistake was accepting confederation. If we'd just joined up with the Americans instead, and batter down all laws protecting our culture and laguage, we would have gotten assimilated anyway, but at least we'd have a stronger economy.

Also, we wouldn't have to deal with the RoC...

That said it is worth reflecting that most of the natural resources that Quebec has is on land that was added post-Confederation.

Quebec received control of that land under a number of requirements, including that they take care of the natives. The natives do not believe that this requirement has been met, which is why for example the Cree voted over 95% for seceding from Quebec if Quebec seceded from Canada, by force if necessary. While the Quebecois were mixed on whether to secede, they had very strong opinions that Quebec was an indivisible whole. Including land given post-Confederation.

It would have been interesting to see what would have happened with this land if the 1995 referendum had gone through. I'm quite sure that nobody outside of Quebec would have agreed with the reasoning that "Canada is divisible but Quebec is not". So how would Canada have handled the question of how to handle the economically valuable parts of Quebec that wanted back into Canada?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Quebec for more on this.

It seems like Canada is prone to buying into extremism. Be it separatism or the recent love-affair with Putinist style economics banking soley on oil/gas and expecting there never to be a shake-up in the market when clearly the industrialized West was going full tilt into renewables.

Thanks to that bill, you had a population of professionals who had moved to Montreal for good jobs who found that, because they were born in a different province, their children could not be educated in English. These professionals found it less painful to move to Toronto and find new jobs than they did to watch their children be forced into schools that didn't speak their language. Companies found that it was cheaper to relocate headquarters than to lose these employees, and this accelerated the brain drain.

Quebec continues to be hostile to anglophone immigration, but most of the damage is now done and permanent.

It's all about bilingualism. As someone who learned french from birth, I could not work in tech if I couldn't also communicate in english. That's a requirement for most jobs and I had to work really hard to get a good level of spoken english.

We have people that speak french and spanish, french and english, french and german, etc.

Bilingualism is strong here, pick it up if you want to work in the area. It's no different for people born in Québec. We learn french at home and then work really hard to learn english for work.

I am a Canadian anglophone from British Columbia with highschool French. My children have been raised in the USA with no French. It would be easier for me to take a job and move my family to The Netherlands than to Montreal. (Not a hypothetical example. I turned down an offer a few years ago at a company that wanted to hire me there. My children would have had to learn Dutch, but would have gone to school in English.)

If you are founding a company and want access to anglophone talent, would you prefer to start it in Montreal or Amsterdam? What are the economic implications of this fact for Quebec?

Quebec has made a decision to value remaining French above economic growth. That's somewhat reasonable. But if you've chosen that, you should be honest with yourselves about the choice you made. And shouldn't be puzzled that your economy has not done so well.

You could argue that some laws make no sense and I would agree on some points but people are very afraid to lose what makes Québec what it is and some harsh measures are put in place.

I believe that you should either make the decision with full awareness of consequences, or else make the opposite decision. But don't make the decision and then be dishonest about what the consequences were.

or I could work anywhere else in Canada or the US and not have to.

There is a strong wish to stay true to our cultural heritage and stay true to our endangered roots as French Canadians. Québec has been fighting pressure to abandon the french language for ages. This is why we have things such as the "Loi 101" and the "Charte de la langue française". It makes sure that people can go in a coffee and order in french without any problems.

You would think this is a non-issue, why force people to speak and write french? It's easy to think that because most of the province is french business and strangers are is going to standardize to french but it's not true. Even with the laws that we have in place, there are a lot of shops or restaurants where they can only offer service in english. It's a constant uphill battle and while some laws make no sense, it's better than having no laws or regulations.

Yes, it is very hard to come and live in Québec if you are not willing to put time and effort to learn french. That's exactly the way we want it.

Sometimes the province is seen as racist and backward from the outside. The truth is that we are a very welcoming people but only to those who acknowledge and try to understand our cultural heritage and the fight that is being fought to stay true to our values despite all the pressure to change.

This is exactly the kind of rhetoric someone from the American south would say about fighting gay marriage or keeping blacks out of their neighborhoods. Yet when it comes to the terrible policies of francophiles, we're supposed to pretend this rhetoric is valid?

It's ridiculous when people (not Quebeckers) can't get a job in Quebec, then they go to other provinces and get a job quickly.

This is something I've seen from close

Not to mention the big gap between provinces, it seems they're more apart than US states