A new report from TD Economics warns that Canada is losing its highest-skilled workers, entrepreneurs, and STEM graduates to the United States through a slow, largely invisible syphoning—calling the phenomenon a “silent brain drain.” The crisis, it argues, is less about who Canada can attract than who it fails to keep.
Much of the outflow never registers in Statistics Canada’s emigration data because it occurs through U.S. employer-sponsored work visas—temporary and semi-permanent pathways that conventional brain drain metrics simply don’t capture. Of the partial data Statistics Canada was able to retrieve, the agency determined that, in 2023, 18,590 Canadian residents emigrated to the U.S. permanently, with 30 percent of those people not being born in Canada.
Report .pdf below
