Salaries are increasing as a result, although the benefits have been masked by inflation, especially for real estate. The long term question is whether the increased demand for Toronto tech talent from US companies translates into more Canadian startups and successful Canadian companies.
So far I like it. More city, less nature than Vancouver.
As I side note anyone know any tech related events to attend in Toronto? Would like to be more involved with hackathons and entrepreneurship communities.
[1] https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/insights/202...
[2] https://www.narcity.com/toronto/the-surprising-average-incom...
What I also found interesting about link [2] is that Alberta households have the highest average income, and despite that housing is a lot more affordable there. That somewhat contradicts that housing cost is driven by income.
Meanwhile in Alberta, where their cities sprawl endlessly, as you point out the ultra highly paid oil workers can buy a detached house for cheap. Always easy to build more on the edge. Not at all possible in Vancouver, which is effectively nearly completely built out at this point.
At this point new housing development in Vancouver will be townhouse or denser and the only place to put it is in existing detached home neighbourhoods. Politically contentious so movement will be slow.
Beyond this there's also the exchange rate difference. The gap is not as large as it was in the 1990s, but there's still some upside for Canadian work for hire shops that get paid by American companies in US dollars.
This article doesn't mention political differences and other intangibles but it should.
There are plenty of places like Miami with low taxes, and Toronto would be making a mistake in taking part in a race to the bottom. It's more effective for Toronto to differentiate itself by other jurisdictions by fundamentally offering different things and being a place that people want to move to because it isn't like the other places.
Amazon and Microsoft have been expanding in a big way amongst many other US tech firms.
I doubt this is true. One of my pet peeves is that people in Toronto (where I am from) occasionally claim that it is the 3rd largest city in "North America", but it depends entirely on the optimistic provisioning of political boundaries (and requires you to ignore Mexico in your definition of North America -- another pet peeve). For example: it's possible that Toronto beats Seattle if you count Bellevue separately, or LA if you split off "Silicon Beach" and Irvine, but I doubt that what people actually mean by "Toronto" beats the aggregated areas people mean when they say "Seattle" and "LA".
But this isn't the saddest part. The article seems to frame success as attracting large US-based tech companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta). This was always the case in Toronto -- there is no shortage of satellite offices attracted by lower local wages. But what is lacking is local technology companies that compete globally: Canada has Shopify, but little else. In general, entrepreneurs and risk takers head south for better fund raising and more risk tolerance and that's where the real value creation happens. Before Toronto (or anywhere else in Canada) can be a real tech town, they need cultural change to grow a real ecosystem with companies that can grow to global competitors. I think this kind of self-congratulatory article is actively harmful because it lulls people into thinking policymakers have done a great job at "attracting tech". Meanwhile, all the Canadians I know that have founded companies and been wildly successful have moved from Canada to the US at some point in their journey.
> Investment in new Toronto companies is still tiny compared with Silicon Valley. In 2021 and 2022, investors pumped $132 billion into Silicon Valley tech start-ups, according to the research firm Tracxn. In Toronto, that figure was $5.4 billion. But ultimately, it is tech talent that drives a tech hub, said Mr. Volpi, a Bay Area venture capitalist who also invested in Cohere.
> “The money will follow the talent,” he said.
Toronto has had the talent for decades. The money doesn't automatically follow, and there are lots of reasons it's not there.
