More and more Canadians are U.S.-bound

U.S. technology giant Ascend Communications Inc. is using this eye-popping illustration to draw Canadian technology professionals to its booth at Monday's HiTech Career Jam.

The number of Canadians who left to work in the United States more than doubled between 1986 and 1996, according to figures provided yesterday by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

The figures suggest that Prime Minister Jean Chretien's statement downplaying the brain drain might not be the full story.

The INS figures show that in 1986, 20,643 Canadians left to work in the United States.

In 1996, the latest year for which figures are available, 47,915 Canadians received work visas or were exempt under NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).

The INS figures are the latest to surface in the debate over whether Canada has a brain drain.

Mr. Chretien said the brain drain is a myth and being orchestrated by "business people who want to have tax cuts.

"The reality," he said, "is that we have less Canadians now moving to the United States than 20 years ago."

Nesbitt Burns economist Sherry Cooper disputed the Prime Minister's statement.

"Comparing things today to what happened 20 years ago is not relevant because back then, the U.S. didn't have the immigration restrictions that they have today," she said.

"What we do know is that the number of visas that have been issued in Canada to Canadians to work in the United States has quintupled in the last five years."

Mr. Chretien's claim also brought an angry response from Gaylen Duncan, president and chief executive of the Information Technology Association of Canada. He said Mr. Chretien should prove his statement by producing his numbers.

"He's working on body count," Mr. Duncan fumed, likening it to the Vietnam War. "We killed more of them than they killed us. More electrical engineers and computer scientists came into Canada from somewhere in the world than left Canada. Therefore, there is no brain drain story."

Mr. Duncan said that was not the issue.

"Our brightest, our best, our entrepreneurial people, the guys who create companies, who create multiple employment situations, those are the guys who are going to the States, and Mr. Chretien has -- and I will say this categorically -- has no data to refute that statement."

For the industry, there is not much question they are locked in a war for scarce talent.

Typically of most hot debates, it is hard to find a firm foundation of reality. Each side uses statistics selectively to prove its point with much mixing of apples and oranges.

Hay Associates reported last week that there are 190,000 information technology job openings in the U.S. with only seven candidates for every 10 positions and staggering 20 per cent annual staff turnover rate. It said the Canadian market is softer partly because millennium computer bug concerns are postponing other development projects.

Still, the skill shortage is driving aggressive recruiting on university campuses, raiding of top talent and soaring compensation packages that increase monthly rather than yearly.

However, most of war is over the cream in each field: experienced people with a track record of developing new products that sell.

The majority of the computer work force makes a good living maintaining systems. They are frequently older, settled and unlikely to be wooed by foreign recruiters.

Still, corporate executives talk of losing top development expertise to U.S. companies because of high taxes and the low dollar. John Roth, the chief executive of Nortel Networks, has said Nortel is losing 300 to 500 engineers annually to the U.S. He has warned that if Nortel continues to lose top talent, the company could be forced to follow. (He refused to comment yesterday on Mr. Chretien's statements.)

But the prime minister points out that Canada continues to do well in the battle for international talent across the third world.

Statistics Canada chief statistician Ivan Fellegi was the first to point out two years ago that the U.S. brain drain is being offset by an International brain gain. He said immigration statistics show that Canada lost 11,000 knowledge (computer experts, scientists, professors and health care professionals) workers in 1995 with slightly more than half going to the U.S.

But Canada attracted 34,300 knowledge workers in 1995 and 42,600 workers in 1996. In the computer business alone, 641 experts left for the U.S. in 1995 while 13,200 arrived from abroad that year and 18,000 the following year.

The prime minister got a powerful assist for his arguments in March from, of all places, a bank economist.

"Levels of net emigration per capita from Canada to the United States are approximately one-third of those recorded in the 1950s and early 1960s,'' said Bank of Montreal deputy chief economist Rick Egelton in a study.

However, the study noted there are troubling signs on the horizon, particularly a "sharp rise'' in working visas the U.S. grants to Canadians and "a modest upward trend'' in net immigration to the U.S. from 1981 to 1997.

Temporary work permits have exploded under the Free Trade Agreement and as many as 60 per cent of the recipients may never return when they discover that high street crime and other U.S. stereotypes are not a big issue in many high-technology work areas.

The bank study noted "the number of permits issued in the U.S. (under NAFTA) skyrocketed from 2,677 in 1989 to 26,794 in 1996, while the number of visas issued by Canada rose more modestly from 2,748 to 13,337."