I've been watching what's been going on in your country the past few weeks, U.S.-based Tech Firms. I see you, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, and you too, little Uber, Reddit, Dropbox and Netflix. I perused your legal brief opposing President Trump's ban on migration from seven Muslim-majority countries. In that brief, you argue, reasonably, that restrictions on hiring the best people make it difficult for you to do your best work. Your best work has served the United States very well. You can be forgiven for feeling a bit disrupted just now and not in the fun "Boy, I'm glad I invested in those guys" way.
What shall it profit a man, if he gains, possibly, a few thousand manufacturing jobs, likely temporarily, and suffer the loss of his technology sector? Well, Donald Trump does seem determined to find out; it's like fighting to keep your farrier jobs while all your iron-horse jobs leave town.
I wish the side of the angels well with this lawsuit, dear tech companies, but it appears the United States' current leader can't tell the difference between engaging with the judiciary and calling room service.
"I ordered the club sandwich with fries and a potentially unconstitutional ban on immigration to be reinstated and I got very terrible service! I got told you are an independent branch of government!" Mr. Trump all but complained, mistaking, as usual, every platform available to him for the front desk.
Even if this current ban is defeated, everything about Mr. Trump suggests there will be future releases and Totally Not a Muslim Ban: Barely Constitutional Edition might pass some legal unit testing, but you just know you're going to run into an XenophobiaOverflowError or PresidentialPowerOutOfBoundsException somewhere down the line.
Even if the courts are ultimately able to keep Mr. Trump in check, his recent rollout suggests the process will involve some nasty side effects that'll leave you longing for functional governance. There's only so much you can do to solve a problem on your end when there's a major bug in the kernel of U.S. government and the maintainers are only taking patch submissions by fax.
What I'm saying to you here, global tech companies situated in the United States, is that it strikes me that in the current climate, your data might have an easier time traversing the globe if it whizzed along those transatlantic cables with a Canadian flag stitched to its packets. Maybe it's time you all gave some thought to moving to Silicold Valley.
I hear what a lot of you are saying; you've never really thought about moving to Canada.
Congratulations! That alone is a good reason to move to Canada. You'll fit right in. I like to ask people who immigrated here why they chose Canada and often they laughingly, sheepishly, admit that Canada was not their first choice. Not that it was their last choice either. Canada was just not a place that had crossed their minds, mostly.
In Hollywood terms, falling in love with Canada is often what they call a "meet cute," which is, say, a story in which two not-on-the-face-of-it-compatible characters are introduced in a somewhat improbable way and, despite their differences, fall in love.
"I wanted to go to America. …" the story often goes, or, "I applied to go to Australia. I had family there …" and then somehow a chance to apply to come to Canada came their way, and the best they could come up with was "Canada? Huh? Why not?"
Together now, 24 years or whatever, Canada and a man from Cape Verde, or Canada and a woman from the Philippines, with a child in engineering school and one teaching in Regina, the randomness of the encounter seems to deepen their appreciation.
Canada is seldom the obvious choice, the sexy choice, the choice you saw in movies, or at least not the choice you saw first. Canada is the girl with the glasses, who, after you get to know her, after you've come to recognize all her other charms, her wit and practicality, her steady nerves in a crisis, takes those glasses off, causing the hero to catch his breath and say, "Why, Canada, you're beautiful." And the love lasts.
I want to extend to you an invitation to make Canada your second choice, tech companies. Your first choice is going through a rough time right now and I understand the desire to stick with it, but there comes a point you have to look out for your own corporate health. Here are some reasons you should consider moving your operations, or more of your operations, our way.
I'd like to be able to promise a naturally cooled data centre (note the "-re" spelling) powered with clean hydro from a melting glacier, but that wouldn't be truthful. In fact, 66 per cent of Canadians live within 100 kilometres (don't worry, we'll explain) of the U.S. border, a relatively glacier-free zone, but we do creative things with snow here in the winter, the sort of things you do with latte foam in California all year round, and we'll show you how.
What I can promise you is that we aren't about to do anything alarming with that border. Far from imposing sudden, random travel restrictions, the kind of thing that might keep Bilal from getting back to the office right away after some genius thought it was good idea to push out that update – yes, that update – right before a holiday, Canada understands that you need Bilal and other specialized workers.
Last fall, in an effort to boost Canada's growing tech sector, Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced plans to implement measures that will help rapidly growing Canadian tech firms and multinational corporations operating here get the skilled foreign workers they need into the country for both short and long-term stints, quickly.
Also, in Canada, everyone has health care. If you need to go to to the doctor, you just go to the doctor, on a cute bike, if you're up for it. To put this in terms you'll understand, tech companies, in Canada, it's basically like everyone already works for Google.
If you're worried that a small (in terms of population) country like ours won't be equipped to welcome your diverse set of employees, don't be. We are a text editorial mosaic. There's room in our great nation for Vim and Emacs users alike. We can probably even find a spot for those nano-using freaks if they don't mind bunking with the caribou. After all, diversity is our strength.
Many of you are a good part Canadian already. An estimated 350,000 Canadians work in California's Bay Area now, many of them in tech. You borrowed a lot of Canadians. Maybe it's time to put some of them back.
Also, you can afford to live here. While property prices, particularly in Vancouver and Toronto, have risen dramatically of late and many of us are confused or alarmed by this and wonder if this boom is sustainable – it's like we've found ourselves living in Dutch tulip bulbs all of a sudden – visitors from San Francisco witness our concern and mostly just think "Oh, that's adorable."
So, if you find yourself looking for a nice, stable country with a diligent and educated work force and a habit of putting cheese curds and gravy on fries – look, we can't be perfect – upcast your eyes our way. You'll be with your people.
Some days, you look at the weather in Canada and, given the choice between going outside in that and working to revolutionize the way we do … something, you just have to choose the latter. Thankfully, not every Canadian dad made a rink in the backyard. A lot of us just went down to the basement and huddled around a desktop to keep warm.
That may be why, this year, Ontario's Waterloo University cracked the list of of top 10 universities in the world to produce unicorn companies – that is, startups with billion-dollar valuations. Sage, the company that produced the list, identified a mere 242 such beasts in the world and we're breeding them.
Mr. Trump is less proficient on a computer than my mother. Sure, last weekend, in attempting to command her tablet to cough up her friend Oksana's phone number, she summoned up a lot of Ukrainian porn, but she's at the table, like much of Canada. Unlike some leaders of the free world, we "do the e-mail thing."
I can assure you that the odds of Canada's Prime Minister randomly tanking your stock by attacking your corporation on Twitter are very low, regardless of the sector in which you operate. Our national security is unlikely to be compromised because our leader retasked the Communications Security Establishment with hosting his child's Minecraft server, even if the kid is great at "the cyber."
There's no polite way to put this, but our leader, in a response to an unexpected question, gave a deft off-the-cuff explanation of quantum computing. Your leader has repeatedly failed the Turing Test on live TV.
Maybe, U.S.-based Tech Firms, you'd feel more at home here, and so I invite you to make .ca the new .io.