Canada's "reverse brain drain" in the age of Trump

Shane Savitsky at Axios

https://www.axios.com/canadas-reverse-brain-drain-in-the-age-of-trump-2487152676.html

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What they're saying: "I've been in tech for over 20 years in Canada and in Silicon Valley, too. I've never seen candidates from the U.S. apply for Canadian positions from places like Silicon Valley," Roy Pereira, the CEO of Zoom.ai, told Axios. "That's never happened."

Why it matters: Since Trump's election, with his attacks on immigration and threats to cut back on visas, France, China and Canada, among other countries, have openly sought to poach American technologists and scientists (as we have written). The reports from Toronto suggest a threat to the United States' long edge as the preeminent magnet for the world's brightest scientific talent.

At the center of all this is MaRS: Toronto has created a 20-story, 1.5-million-square-foot startup incubator within a dense core of the city, across the street from the University of Toronto and crammed among nine research and teaching hospitals. Some 150 medical, artificial intelligence, energy, fintech and other startups have quarters in the MaRS Discovery District, in addition to IBM, Autodesk, Merck and the Vector Institute, a new AI research center that's received about $200 million in government and industry funding.

The key stat: 62% of the high-growth Canadian companies that responded to a July survey by MaRS indicated that they'd seen a notable recent increase in U.S.-based applicants. Some key examples from Toronto:

Zoom.ai, an enterprise chatbot startup, has seen nearly a third of its applicants for its engineering positions come from the U.S., up from almost none. That number peaked in February but has remained largely constant in the months afterward.

Cyclica, which assists pharmaceutical companies with drug discovery and approval, said that 85% of its applicants for a business development leadership role this year were U.S.-based. That's up from 35% last June for similar job openings.

Figure 1, the "Instagram for doctors," saw its U.S.-based applicants double for senior-level roles and increase by 50% for engineering roles year-over-year in January.


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