I got a bit of blowback for Friday’s blog criticizing that U of T/Brock piece on the alleged Brain Drain.  Nobody tried to argue that my critique of the methodology was wrong, but some argued that a) data on migration is always terrible and I was making the perfect the enemy of the good and b) I was ignoring the core truth that a lot of Canadian tech talent does head south and this makes things difficult for Canadian tech firms, and snark is well and good but what are we going to do about this migration?

So, first of all: I’m the last person to make the perfect the enemy of the good where data is concerned, I just happen to care that claims match the data.  My primary objection to the U of T/Brock piece was that it made claims about STEM when its data was mostly about a subset of those fields (mainly math, computer science, electrical/computer/software engineering).  The fact that the data was suboptimal (only three universities, only using those graduates with LinkedIn profiles), suggested to me that the extent of the exodus might be exaggerated, but I don’t doubt the underlying premise that a lot of grads in those fields are heading south.  There is a saying in some corners of social science that if a phenomenon is big enough, even a bad methodology can discover it.  I’d say the exodus of tech talent definitely falls into that category.

The question then is, “why is tech talent emigrating”.  The simple, first order answer is “because talented graduates can make more down there”.  But that’s only half the story, I think.  Wages, to some degree at least, are a function of productivity and profitability.  If the US tech industry pays higher wages to staff (and here’s some pretty infographics to suggest they do), that’s not simply or even principally because American tech companies are vastly more enlightened than their Canadian counterparts and love paying more.  They pay more because the products and services they make are, on the whole, better than the ones our companies make and thus command better prices and lead to more profits, etc.  Also, having obtained technical leadership in tech years ago, the Americans continue to build on it, and are generally closer to the forefront of technology than we are in most tech fields.  For many of the most talented young grads, who want to challenge themselves against the best in the world, that makes the US “the place to be”.

But it occurs to me that the problem which Canada – and in particular what we are now ludicrously forced to call “the Toronto-Waterloo corridor” – currently faces is exactly the problem the Atlantic provinces have faced for the last 40 years (if not more): how do we stop our best young people decamping to (insert location here)?   All the kinds of things the tech policy crew are arguing for with respect to tech grads: create financial penalties for leaving, improving work-integrated learning/co-op, using moral suasion to stigmatize the act of migration (they don’t ask for that last one directly, but I think it’s implied), etc, have been fantastically unsuccessful for the Atlantic provinces – so why on earth do we think they will work for tech in central Canada?

Let’s not pretend that there are simple answers to this question.  We will never compete with the US as a home for world-leading tech companies.  We might and do attract those companies to establish presences here in small numbers, but we lack the population, the money, and, to some extent, the desire to produce those companies in significant numbers (and the fates of RIM and Nortel suggest that even if companies reach those heights, there’s no guarantee they will stay there).  What we can do, and to some extent have been doing with some success, is work out how Canadian tech companies can better fit in niches in global tech supply chains.  At the level of policy that means a lot of very sector-specific policies, not grandiose economy-wide policy initiatives.

[the_ad id=”12598″]

In terms of broad policies, I can only see three that will make much difference.  The first is to open the doors to more skilled worker immigration so as to offset some of the losses from our own out-migration.  The second is simply to over-produce graduates with the skills needed to work in the industry so the outflow doesn’t matter as much (note: this is not quite the same thing as saying we should ramp up degrees in tech field, though that’s probably part of the equation; to some degree we can make the tech talent pool better by mixing more tech skills into other degrees, a point that seems to continually elude policy commentators on this field).  Canada is already moving on both of these fronts, with new express visas for top tech talent and substantially increased STEM/tech enrolments.

The third – the one where we’re failing – is working to make Canada’s major cities attractive to young people.  And I don’t mean attractive in the Richard Florida, cool-cities snake oil sense.  I mean it in the can young people afford decent dwellings sense.  That means expanding the stock of dwellings much faster than we currently are.  You don’t need to hand things over to developers or kill the Green Belt to make that happen, but you do need to do things like tax the crap out of land, densify like mad, make life difficult for NIMBYs, etc.  But that takes political courage, because the one cardinal rule in Canadian politics is apparently “don’t annoy boomer homeowners sitting on flipping huge wodges of windfall capital gains”.  And courage of that nature is in short supply these days.

None of those are guarantees, of course, as any Maritimer (or Newfoundlander) will tell you.  It’s hard for jurisdictions to compete with places which are richer and more densely populated.  Part of mature policy-making is understanding the limitations of policy in the face of overwhelming gaps in human and financial endowments.  Sometimes, policy is just about holding losses to a minimum.

But there is one policy route we should never go down, and that is the idea of penalizing students who try to move.  Maritime provinces do this by denying certain forms of financial assistance to students who don’t stay in the province; there are occasional calls in Canada to make students who leave the country after graduating “pay extra”.  It’s never entirely clear how this is supposed to work, but the basic idea is that “they” should pay “us” back, because “we” invested all this money in them and we need a return.

Please.  Kids have a right to a subsidized education because their parents spent their life paying taxes.  We give them the best education we can and we say vaya con dios because their talents are theirs to own and develop, not ours.  The system exists mainly for students’ benefit, not the taxpayer’s.  Plus. it is the height of hypocrisy to simultaneously extoll the virtues of immigration to Canada and shame those who choose to find their future abroad.  We can’t have that both ways.

Bottom line: there are no simple answers to talent drains, but it behooves central Canadians to cast their eyes eastward and reflect on the experiences of Atlantic Canada before dreaming up “solutions”.