While deeply unlikely to change anything it really is important as much noise is made about this as possible.
On top of this will be C-34 which is just full no privacy anymore territory https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/06/everything-all-at-once-b...
The gov do all this and then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses leaving all the value being captured by the Americans. Surprised pikachus all round.
> then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses...
That's not why an indigenous Canadian tech industry is non-existent.
Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).
Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
> Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).
That's actually not true for most of those countries. None of those countries other than maybe China have laws requiring encryption backdoors.
Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.
Oh cool, we should set up stricter free speech restrictions in order to encourage our nascent tech sector. Sure thing champ.
Canadian tech is nonexistent because we continue to see ourselves as a colony instead of a country, a resource-extraction post-national economic state instead of a people.
A lot of the Indian tech industry is really just the tech industry from other countries being outsourced to there.
Not everything though. There are huge unicorns that serve the Indian market in India.
Sure foreign players do play a role, yet it still has the 4th largest VC dealflow [0] in the world ($9.3B) at 2x the size of Canada's entire market which highlights a significantly larger market. And unlike Canadian startups, most Indian startups IPO domestically [1] thus building a self-sustaining capital market
[0] - https://dealroom.co/guides/global
[1] - https://internationalbanker.com/finance/india-is-undergoing-...
I didn't realize the VC market was that strong there. A lot of the stuff I read on here had previously pointed to it being a tough startup market.
Tough as in a lot of competition. A lot of market segments dominated by Chinese manufactures have a relentless stream of Indian Startups nipping at their heels, is what I understand.
Chinese players don't compete with Indian companies as both China and India have blocked access to either's market. For example, Chinese digital exports remained banned in India and even Chinese players in India like SAIC and Xiaomi have been de facto Indianized via forced ownership changes, similar to what China used to do when it was in India's shoes in the 2000s when competing against the US.
When people on HN talk about the difficulty in the Indian startup scene, it about whether to raise in India or raise in the US and then operate in India.
And why, pray tell, is that the case? Because the Liberal government has created a terrible environment for Canadian businesses over the last 11 years, ballooning the size of the public service and the amount of regulations and bureaucratic oversight, as well as trying to pick winners by handing out subsidies to all the wrong companies in service of their ideological agenda. They would rather companies fail than succeed without their "help". That, and they've done everything in their power to keep the housing bubble juiced instead of allowing an RE correction. But hey, running the country into the ground while trying to blame everything on the orange man gets you elected, so I don't expect any course correction.
The premise seems wrong here. As someone who worked my whole career in Canadian tech I assure you it exists.
Because US has far better opportunities and more money.
My personal experience in doing business in Canada: each industry is monopolized by two or three companies, you need to get their “blessing” before you can do anything in that sector. Government contracts aren’t much, but even with that, it’s nepotism based, you will get a contract knowing someone who will indirectly get benefits from you, for example you will hire people they know, so kinda laundering the money. Lengthy regulations, you might wait months to get an SFOC for example (in drones, where you might need a special flight operation certificate) to do a simple operation, only to repeat that for another test. Securing clients, a combination of low on money and usually clients prefer US based companies, your best bet is securing a big client that will be your backbone, so back to point one where you need a blessing from a big company. And Im talking here about a business where there’s an opportunity to scale up, so food truck business and the local plumbing work aren’t part of that.
> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
Off-topic but I suspect it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes. Canadian investors are risk adverse because they can be. That and there's a colonial-descended cultural bias towards credentials and established players.
But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings, and would love to get investment to build a startup off of it, but every time I sniff around the Canadian "investor" scene it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me.
I have a (admittedly unevidenced) hypothesis that the US took off from other economies after ‘08 because real estate became a spectacularly shit investment overnight and investors had to invest in productive things for returns. Investors in Canada kept passing the same pieces of land between each other for no benefit to society. My pipe dream is that Canada grows the balls to annhilate property values
They kept selling residential property to foreign money launderers. In the US that activity is confined to major metros where it impacts the more distributed population density less significantly.
Don't worry, we have our own domestic money launderers as well. And whenever the gov't tries to close loopholes they riot. (Also half the gov't MPs are landlords, so ...)
Even if real estate were to implode, Canada has a pretty much permanent sickness on account of being a "rip n' ship" resource exporter over everything else. Since confederation.
It lends itself to a rentier capitalist model, and to oligarchies, and to a stagnant conservative investment class that just wants to coast off their proximity to resources.
Real estate coasting is arguably even worse, but not by much.
Notably the United States is actually trying to make this worse with their tariffs on us. Alberta oil and gas is tariff free while our value added manufacturing sectors are highly tariffed.
It makes no sense to try to kill Quebec's aluminum sector since it's the most logical place to smelt aluminum on the whole continent, but they're trying to, anyways.
>> But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings,
Probably not relevant to thus thread, and hopefully redundant to you, but writing the code is the easy part.
If you have not already done so figure out your market and start marketing to them. Get deposits, build a mailing list of interested parties, build a presence where your customers hang out.
Marketing is the hard part. Get that done first before writing code. Most ideas fail not because of bad product but because there's no market, it's too hard to reach the market, or you're solving a problem no one will spend money on.
Before depleting all your savings, learn from all the threads in the "ask" section. Code counts for nothing without hod marketing. And marketing is the hard part, the code part is easy.
As an aside, the startup which has a market and marketing sorted out is a lot more attractive to investors.
Yes, all good advice. In reality what I need is probably a cofounder.
Canada definitely has a "first buyer problem" which makes it hard to get liftoff. A great many Canadian startups end up going to the US to get funding to get around this issue.
> it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes
Partially. The money made in ONG and Construction is then re-invested in American equities. And even provincial pension like Ontario Teachers and La Caisse funds prefer investing in American equities instead because their only incentive is pension solvency.
The issue is Canada is simply a tiny country with an extremely loose confederation in a world that is returning to a "winner takes all" mindset dependent on hard unification.
More tactically, using a Yozma-style approach to subsidize Canadian VC would help sow the seeds for a truly self sustaining ecosystem.
> it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me
Because they don't and never will. Anyone who has potential gets frustrated and leaves (ofc I've poached a couple as well).
> Heck, China, Israel, and India all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements.
It's almost like all three of those involve absolutely enormous captive markets, including for their defence/espionage purposes.