The Canadian flag flies atop the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.
Canadian business and political leaders cheering the news that U.S. President Donald Trump will slap a US$100,000 fee on H-1B work visas reveals much that is wrong with this country.
H-1B work visas (only 85,000 were issued in 2025) are used largely by U.S. technology giants and other knowledge-based industries to fill roles that require expertise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Amazon, for example, secured 14,667 of them this year.
The median income for H-1B workers is about US$110,000, according to the American Immigration Council, a middle-class income in many parts of the U.S.
The new, US$100,000 fee prompted delusions of grandeur in Canada, with talk of scooping up foreign talent seeking lives in the U.S. RBC CEO Dave McKay told Bloomberg News that it will give people from India, South Asia and Europe reason to think: “Well, I can’t get into the U.S., but I want to move to North America – I’ll come to Canada.” Workforce experts echoed Mr. McKay’s sentiments in these pages.
In New York, Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that the new visa requirements would likely prevent some top Canadian AI talent from finding work in the U.S. British Columbia’s Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth, Ravi Kahlon, took to social media to invite “tech talent, innovators, and scientists to come to B.C.”
Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee could help Canada recruit foreign workers, experts say
In today’s Canada, business leaders are excited to welcome people who don’t want to be here, our Prime Minister makes merry in front of a Manhattan audience over Canadians who now can’t afford to go to greener pastures in the U.S., and a B.C. cabinet minister offers false hope for social media hits knowing full well that in April his government announced that the number of economic immigrants it would nominate this year would be near zero.
A Canadian Senate report from 2024 is an indictment of Canadian talent development. It details how 6.5 million Canadians don’t have a family doctor; that by 2031 we will be short nearly 80,000 physicians; and that literally thousands of international medical graduates, many Canadian-born, raised and qualified, can’t practise here because we haven’t figured out a way to license them. At the same time, thousands of qualified Canadian STEM graduates attend foreign medical schools because we don’t have enough spaces in ours.
As the medical talent debacle unfolds, so does one involving tech talent. Canadian tech leaders have decided there are better places to do business than Canada. As reported in The Globe and Mail, Leaders Fund, a Toronto venture capital firm, tracked almost 3,000 high-potential Canadian startups for a decade. The results reveal a dramatic trend: Sixty-seven per cent of Canadian startups launched in 2024 are headquartered outside Canada, many in the U.S.
The survey shows that those startups can raise almost twice as much capital in the U.S. than in Canada. Canadian government programs are “often designed by people who have never operated a business” and are ineffective. Leadership development is given short shrift, and Canadians tend to “vilify success” rather than celebrate it.
Seymour Schulich, one of Canada’s most respected business leaders and a supporter of the Leaders Fund, said “we’re seeing in tech what we’ve witnessed in oil, gas and mining – a steady departure of top talent and headquarters.”
The rot runs wide. Economists at National Bank of Canada have been writing about the disaster that is our industrial sector, which has material consequences for industrial workers and engineers. “Real investment in industrial machinery and equipment fell in Q2 to its lowest level on record (data back to 1981).” They call the divergence between our industrial sector and America’s “appalling.”
Opinion: Trump’s H-1B visa price hike is good for Canada
Canadian universities and colleges, where we expect to help our best and brightest shine, face a financial crisis – budget deficits, course reductions, program closures and staff cuts.
And how do Canadian employers fare in developing homegrown talent? The Labour Market Information Council produced an exhaustive report on this in 2023 and concluded that “Canadian firms invest modestly in training – an estimated $240 per employee annually – and lag their international peers in rates and hours of instruction.”
Mix in the lack of affordable housing, the high cost of living and fear about violent crime in our cities, and Plan B (Canada) for skilled foreign workers looks a lot like an invite to a run-down cottage that features pleasant views.
Soon after Mr. Trump began turning up his tariff attacks on our economy, public service messages were developed for broadcast on radio and other platforms urging us to “Buy Canadian as if your country depended on it.”
We need to invest in both Canadians and Canada, because our country really does depend on it. Nobody is coming to save us.