FIRST READING: Canadian talent (and money) is fleeing to the U.S.

National Post

7 days ago

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This month, one of the world's most well-known Canadian residents finalized his plans to leave Canada for good.
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The term 'famous Canadian' almost always describes someone who no longer lives in the country of their birth. Neil Young, Justin Bieber, Malcolm Gladwell, Ryan Reynolds, Alanis Morrissette; all of them live full-time in the United States, and have done so for years.
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Until recently, Jordan Peterson was an exception. He could sell out stadiums in Europe and pen best-selling books in the United States, but his home base remained Toronto, where he retained his position as a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.
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But with Peterson officially putting his Toronto home up for sale as part of a permanent move to Arizona, he's effectively severing his last physical tie to Canada in what he's described as a ' painful parting.'
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And news of the Peterson sale happened to break in the same week that another prominent figure announced that he was reluctantly abandoning his Canadian address. In a widely circulated op-ed for the National Post, Vancouver Jewish community leader Michael Sachs said he could no longer justify raising his family in Canada when the U.S. was an option.
'I have received multiple death threats over the last few years for advocating for my community. For my family, the luxury of patience has run out and our confidence in Canada's political leadership is gone,' he wrote.
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Both Peterson and Sachs have their own political reasons for leaving, but they're part of an accelerating trend. Canada has always struggled to stop capital and top talent from fleeing abroad, but what was once a steady trickle of people leaving may be ramping up.
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In a Thursday social media post, the chief operating officer for Shopify, Kaz Nejatian, said he had multiple Jewish friends tell him their plans to leave.
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'They say they no longer feel safe sending their kids to school here,' he said.
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That same day, the U.S.-based National Review profiled several Jewish Canadians who were either mulling a move to the U.S. for safety reasons, or had already done so. They included veteran Conservative political organizer Georgann Burke, who cited noticeable increases in both antisemitic hatred and anti-American hatred. 'I have received a series of really nasty emails. One was from someone who actually threatened to kill me,' she said.
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Another, Toronto real estate developer Avi Glina, characterized Canada's steep rise in Jewish hate not as something distinct from the country's various economic ills, but a symptom of it.
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'Antisemitism is a symptom of a broken economy and nation state,' he said.
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As far back as 2022, U.S. data was showing a noticeable spike in Canadians moving across the border. When that year's incoming Canadians were compared against outgoing Canadians, the U.S. Census Bureau determined that they had taken in a net 42,825 newcomers. It was the fastest growth in Canadian immigration they'd seen since 2013.
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And Canada's own figures are also tracking a spike in departures.
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In the first three months of 2025, Statistics Canada counted 27,086 emigrants permanently leaving the country. That's up from 25,394 in the first quarter of 2022.
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Emigration figures include both citizens and permanent residents, so some of those departures may include recent immigrants who are ditching Canada for new horizons.
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But regardless, it represents a near-unprecedented rate of established Canadians deciding they don't want to live here anymore.
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'Aside from a spike in 2017, this is the highest sustained outflow since the 1960s,' reads an analysis of the emigration figures by Better Dwelling.
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Over the 12 months preceding the April federal election, a total of 106,900 were added to the Canadian emigration rolls. On whatever day that Peterson finally left Canada for good, he would have been among about 300 Canadians doing the same.
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Canada's chief weakness in retaining talent and money is economic.
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In fields ranging from engineering to law, the average Canadian professional can not only make more money in the United States, but face dramatically lower housing prices and cost of living expenses.
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The disparity has long been most obvious in the tech sector. In some years, the University of Waterloo's software engineering department has immediately lost up to 85 per cent of its graduates to jobs in the United States.
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As one Canadian engineering student put it in a lengthy 2022 blog post about the Canadian brain drain, ''Cali or bust' and 'US or bust' are common terms I heard throughout my undergrad in engineering.'
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The two countries used to be much more comparable for housing and wages, but the last 10 years have seen U.S. per-capita GDP surge ahead of Canada, while Canadian housing unaffordability has simultaneously surged ahead of the U.S.
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And if Canada's economy is scaring away people, it's also scaring away money. A Thursday update by Statistics Canada confirmed that both Canadian and foreign investors have been feverishly divesting from the Canadian economy, with $83.9 billion having been divested from Canadian securities in just the last four months.
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According to Statistics Canada, a lot of that divested money was being poured into the United States instead.
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One of the most illuminating polls from Canada's current trade war with the United States was a January survey finding that four in 10 Canadian young people would vote to dissolve their country if it meant that they could receive U.S. citizenship.
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The question was whether respondents would vote for Canada to become a part of the United States provided the U.S. 'offered all Canadians full U.S. citizenship and a full conversion of the Canadian dollar and all personal financial assets into US dollars.'
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The cohort that liked the idea more than anyone else was Canadians under 34; 43 per cent said they would trade their country's sovereignty for such a deal.