Why Smart Canadians Are Fleeing for the U.S.
It started with Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre, who destroyed accountability in Ottawa.
By Reuven Brenner
April 24, 2025 5:43 pm ET
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Engineering students in a robot competition at the University of British Columbia. Photo: Liang Sen/Zuma Press
Then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to President Trump’s suggestion that the threat of tariffs might prompt Canada to spend more on defense and border protection with a dire prediction: “Canada cannot then survive as a nation state.” Mr. Trump then quipped that Canada might be better off as the 51st state. It was Mr. Trudeau’s flippant, pathetic comment that made a mockery out of Canada, not Mr. Trump’s response to it.
Canada is the second-largest country in the world by land mass, endowed with vast natural wealth. With a smaller population of 40 million compared with its southern neighbor’s roughly 340 million people, Canada contributed handily to the Allies’ victory in World War II. And Mr. Trudeau thought a tariff renegotiation could be the end of his country?
Missing in debates about free trade and tariffs is discussion about the movement of people between the U.S. and Canada. The Census Bureau says 126,340 Canadians moved to the U.S. in 2022, up from 75,752 in 2012. Among those headed south are Canada’s top technical talents—attracted by high salaries, wider varieties of work and greater career options. More than 70% of the University of Waterloo’s software engineering class of 2022 accepted job offers in the U.S.
A back of the envelope calculation puts the wealth transfer from the exodus of so many smart young Canadians at tens of billions of dollars a year, if not hundreds of billions. The numbers floating around the tariff debate are a rounding error by comparison.
The weakening of Canada has much to do with the disastrous fiscal and regulatory policies started by Mr. Trudeau’s father, Pierre, who as prime minister in the 1970s managed to destroy accountability in Ottawa. That’s when Canada’s brain drain began, and accountability has never been truly restored.
If Canada seeks a stronger negotiating position on trade, it should reform domestic fiscal and regulatory policies to retain talent and attract more from the rest of the world. Instead, Canada is trying to force people to stay. This week Quebec’s provincial government passed a bill compelling new doctors to spend the first five years of their careers working in Quebec’s public-health network. Doctors who take a job in the private sector or move to another province before their five years of public service are up face daily fines of as much as 200,000 Canadian dollars (around US$145,000).
Tariffs and taxes don’t make societies prosper. Retaining and attracting skilled, disciplined people who believe in their country’s future does. Think of 17th-century Amsterdam and postwar West Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, Israel and the U.S. All experienced a massive in-migration of brains. All had decentralized, deep financial markets and offered limited, gradual access to welfare benefits.
Restricting the movement of people only leads to morose, unstable societies that blame others for their failures.
Mr. Brenner is a professor at McGill University and author of “Labyrinths of Prosperity” and “Force of Finance.”
