Canada has long consoled itself with a particular self-image, that, whatever its economic shortcomings, it remains a magnet for the world’s talent. People want to come here. The numbers back that up. But a harder question is beginning to surface in the data, not how many people arrive, but how many stay—and whether the ones who leave are the ones Canada can afford to lose.
I recently documented Canada’s net emigration and the disproportionate loss of high-earning, highly educated Canadians, particularly to the United States—the entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, and financiers whose economic contributions far exceed their numbers.
That finding tells only half the story. The other half is what is happening on the immigration intake side of Canada’s human capital equation, and it points in the same troubling direction.
