Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay
As a Candian, it seems to me so very pathetically and predictably Canadian to literally herald the surrender of your own industries to foreign takeover.<p>Canada is (often) to tech what Mexico is to cars.<p>Mexican &#x27;assembly&#x27; of cars is fine and good, but they don&#x27;t exactly move up the value chain from there.<p>Canada produces a lot of decent tech people, who will work for 2&#x2F;3 the wages, unfortunately, this doesn&#x27;t map to a successful entrepreneurial climate. Now, that&#x27;s a hard thing to contemplate, as &#x27;nobody&#x27; can really compete with SV at their own game, but it&#x27;s disingenuous in the least to farm out labor and compare that activity with those doing much of the higher-level work, and most importantly: controlling the profits.<p>Maybe the Mexico analogy goes a little bit too far, as there are tech startups and a few decent companies in Toronto, by and large, but they have serious trouble scaling into anything. To be fair, it&#x27;s not like most US cities are any better. In fact, aside from the weather and lack of charm, Toronto is a &#x27;better all-around city&#x27; than most American cities.<p>But there&#x27;s a serious lack of exceptionalism, and far too many of Toronto&#x27;s best move on to the US, London, or elsewhere.<p>This kind of &#x27;pathetic nationalism&#x27; is why loathe the CBC. It&#x27;s as though they are utterly unaware of the extent to which they extoll mediocrity.<p>Canadians are well educated, get along pretty well, and the &#x27;average person&#x27; in Canada in many ways lives better than the average American, at very least there&#x27;s a lot less calamity, fraud, there&#x27;s full healthcare which isn&#x27;t great but it&#x27;s mostly good.<p>But - on the issue of talent and exceptionalism, it&#x27;s a disaster. We are near the bottom of the OECD it talent and R&amp;D expenditures. Canada sends China &#x27;raw materials&#x27; and they send us back finished goods: this is the opposite of &#x27;first world&#x2F;developing world&#x27; trading norm.<p>We should not be hailing mediocrity as a victory. It&#x27;s nice to have jobs, but there is no Valley of the North.