Those looking to forge a career in Canadian tech have long been wise to seek habitat in one of the nation’s major innovation hubs.
These select few, highly concentrated ecosystems—Vancouver and the Calgary-Edmonton corridor on the West, and Montreal and the Greater Toronto Empire to the East—house the overwhelming majority of tech companies in Canada, and in turn most of the country’s tech workers as well.
Once within a Canadian hub, there are many similarities, particularly in terms of compensation.
The 2023 “Canadian Tech Occupiers Guide” from Colliers, which explores the evolving intersection of Canadian tech and commercial real estate, found that the average annual salary for a tech worker is similar across Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa—from around $74,000 to $77,000.
Certain professions within tech pay higher than others, and this generally holds true across regions as well. For example, software professionals and ICT professionals enjoy average salaries closer to $90,000, while those working in telecommunications and life sciences sectors earn an average of $65,000 to 70,000.
From 2020 through 2022, Canada’s tech talent workforce expanded by 150,000, according to CBRE’s 2023 Scoring Tech Talent report.
Zooming out further, nearly 300,000 technology jobs have been created in Canada over the past six years, according to data from CompTIA.
But unfortunately, while all of these Canadian tech workers tend to make the same as each other, they also tend to make a lot less than their American counterparts.
Using U.S. and Canadian statistical and survey datasets, a report titled “Mind the Gap” by the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University revealed a concerning compensation disparity between borders.
“The research raises an alarm on the glaring disparity in competitiveness of the tech industries in Canada and America,” report author Vivian Li stated in October. “The U.S. offers better wages than Canada despite the talent and potential that Canada possesses through its graduates and institutions.”
At an impact north of $110 billion, the tech industry represents more than 5% of Canada’s overall economy.
Li warned that if Canada does not become competitive in terms of compensation for tech workers, “we could further lose this valuable asset thereby dwarfing our capability to grow and strengthen our overall economy and prosperity.”
Canada can’t compete directly with the US on everything, of course—America is a different beast entirely, one which “houses the largest tech companies in the world and has a population 8.7 times the size of Canada,” noted Jeremy Shaki, chief executive of Vancouver-born Lighthouse Labs, in a November op-ed for TechTalent.ca discussing the country’s “brain drain crisis.”
But there are still key areas where Canada should post an advantage—yet falls short. An obvious but powerful example Shaki points to is how “Canada should have a cost of living advantage compared to the U.S., but the reality is that it doesn’t.”
With the highest per capita immigration rate in the world, Canada promises a good life for newcomers. Yet many immigrants end up leaving Canada for higher salaries, lower taxes, cheaper housing, and a stronger dollar south of the border, Shaki laments.
Alleviating that disparity “will be critical if Canada wants to keep its talent here,” he wrote, which includes investors taking greater risks to back innovative companies with potential for high exit valuations and a Canadian government that encourages innovation and capital investment into our economies.
Net tech employment in Canada cracked 1,350,000 workers in 2022 and is projected to grow by more than 1% this year, resulting in nearly 1.4 million total workers across the country, according to CompTIA’s “State of the Tech Workforce Canada.”
