Ottawa’s shutting-out of startup founders is shutting down Canada’s future

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Yung Wu is a serial entrepreneur and the former chief executive of MaRS Discovery District.

Canada is no longer accepting new applications to its Start‑up Visa Program. The program was the federal pathway to permanent residency for immigrant founders who secured backing from vetted Canadian investors or incubators and committed to building their companies here. It was designed to do something simple and powerful: Attract people who create economic growth for Canada.

At a time when countries are competing fiercely for founders who will build the next generation of global companies, Canada has chosen to narrow that funnel. Yes, the backlog was immense – wait times stretching toward a decade were indefensible, and fraud in the system needed stopping. But shutting down the main federal path for entrepreneurial immigrants, and promising a “new, targeted pilot program” with no clarity on its ambition, is not a fix.

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The story of modern innovation is, overwhelmingly, a story of immigrants. In the United States, more than half of billion‑dollar “unicorn” startups have at least one immigrant founder, and nearly two‑thirds have an immigrant founder or senior leader.

Consider the “Magnificent Seven” – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. Together, they now account for roughly 35 per cent of the S&P 500’s total value. Every single one was founded, co‑founded or led by an immigrant or someone raised in an immigrant household – from Steve Jobs, son of a Syrian immigrant, to Elon Musk from South Africa, to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang from Taiwan. When we talk about immigrant entrepreneurs, we are talking about the people who create the firms that drive productivity, exports and economic growth. Entrepreneurs create jobs. They don’t take them.

I did not have the good fortune to be born in Canada. Like many newcomers, my family brought little in material terms. What we carried was conviction: everything to gain and nothing to lose by betting on a new country; a gratitude that becomes a fierce hunger to contribute; and an aspiration to make a difference, backed by a tolerance for risk. That is also the psychological profile of an entrepreneur.

I have watched immigrant founders arrive with nothing but their willingness to bet everything on their vision. The work is brutal – no safety net, years of uncertainty. But for those with the resilience to survive and eventually thrive, the prize is unmistakable: companies that go global, employ thousands, add billions to Canada’s economy and spawn the next generation of founders.

The numbers prove what is at stake. Through the pandemic years, the MaRS Discovery District innovation ecosystem of science and tech companies grew by more than 450 per cent, contributing roughly $30-billion to Canada’s GDP and supporting a venture community that now employs over 32,000 workers. About half were founded immigrants.

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Consider StackAdapt, a Toronto‑based advertising technology company co‑founded by Russian immigrant Vitaly Pecherskiy. In just over a decade, StackAdapt has grown from a three‑person startup into a Canadian success story valued in the billions, operating across three continents and ranking among Deloitte’s fastest‑growing firms.

Another example: Wattpad, created in Toronto by two immigrants from Hong Kong, Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen. What began as a mobile reading app in 2006 became a global storytelling platform with more than 90 million monthly users, and in 2021 it was acquired by South Korea’s Naver in a deal worth roughly three‑quarters of a billion dollars. These are not edge cases. They are exactly the kinds of founders the Start‑Up Visa was meant to attract and scale.

Meanwhile, Canada is stuck in a familiar trap: weak investment, low innovation and too few high‑growth firms. Yet instead of aggressively fixing the Start‑Up Visa – tightening oversight of designated organizations, resourcing genuine due diligence and setting clear service standards – we have closed the door and deferred the solution to a future pilot whose contours are still vague.

We are not the only country wrestling with the politics of immigration. Even as the United States turns inward and raises barriers for skilled workers and entrepreneurs, its technology dominance still rests disproportionately on immigrant founders and their teams.

This should be Canada’s moment: to position ourselves as the destination of choice for the world’s builders, especially in the sectors that will determine our economic sovereignty – artificial intelligence, quantum computing, defence and dual‑use technologies, life sciences, energy transition and advanced manufacturing.

It is not too late to correct course. Ottawa must treat the shutdown of the Start‑up Visa Program not as a restart but a fast pivot. That pivot must include a fast‑track, by‑invitation pathway for founders with credible backing to build from Canada, with rigorous integrity checks rather than paralyzing backlogs. Anything less will send the most ambitious entrepreneurs elsewhere.