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-Brain Drain
"How can Canada become a destination for 20-30 year old talent?"
2007
Wednesday, April 11, 2007 McGill downplays medical brain drain
Graduates dominate U.S. market. Low pay and restrictive working conditions cited as reasons why students look south
JAN RAVENSBERGEN, The Gazette
McGill University trained almost one in every four Canadian-schooled doctors currently working in the United States - even though the Montreal institution produces only about one of every 15 Canadian medical graduates.
The figures "are not as alarming as might appear at first glance," Richard Levin, dean of McGill's Faculty of Medicine, insisted yesterday.
Sunday 04 March 2007 Canada a culprit in China's brain drain
The Chinese government has raised an alert about a severe brain drain and has listed Canada among the top recipients of its exported talent.Tuesday Mar 11, 2003 cbc
Denied in Ontario, teen goes to Princeton
A Hamilton high school student whose scientific research on Alzheimer's disease won her international acclaim is going to Princeton after three Ontario universities rejected her in part because they have no means to deal with exceptional applicants. [She is better off now]
 Eva Vertes Attacking Alzheimers
Eva Vertes is not hard to find! A Google search got Results of about 72. Search took 0.16 seconds
Karel Swith of the University of Toronto, on CBC TV, indacated that if the University had know about Eva Vertes she might have been admited. Top schools in other countries seek out the best and make an effort to attrack them into their school.
Eva Vertes, 18, whose first-place finish in last year's Intel International Science Fair landed her on the cover of Maclean's magazine, was not admitted to the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario or her hometown school, McMaster, where she spent many after-school evenings doing research in one of Canada's top neurology labs.
Monday, October 14, 2002 globe Engineers give a helping hand
Canadian graduates are working on projects in poor countries, OLIVER BERTIN writes
By Oliver Bertin,
It started as a pie-in-the-sky idea among a couple of junior engineers with no money, no people and no resources.Three years later, Engineers Without Borders is evolving into one of the key development aid organizations in Canada.
www.macleans.ca/ COVER:
The Brain Gain
While some worry about a Canadian brain drain, the flow across the nation's borders has always been in two directions.
Thursday 4 January 2001 Director's ascent reads like film script
By:BRENDAN KELLY The Gazette
Montreal is in the midst of an economic, social and cultural revival spurred by a new generation of dynamic young leaders.
These movers and shakers have already left their mark on the city in the fields of business, science, new technology, politics, sports, the arts, education and community service.
16/Nov/2000 Brain gain
By: SARAH DOUGHERTY The Gazette
Eight years ago, tired of Montreal and ready for a change, Michael Gaug took up an offer to do a stint at his employer's office in sunny California.
An engineering project manager for Spar Aerospace Ltd., Gaug oversaw a satellite contract in the original high-tech mecca of the U.S. - Silicon Valley.
November 20, 2000Aerospace executive urges governments to stop industry brain-drain
Aerospace executive urges governments to stop industry
brain-drain Canadian Press MONTREAL (CP) - Increased funding to train
science and engineering students and more internationally competitive tax
rates are vital to stemming a brain-drain that could plague Canada's
aerospace indu ...
November 17, 2000 Wanted: teachers for techies
Wanted: teachers for techies Jill Vardy Financial Post
OTTAWA - There are two ways to recruit the skilled technology workers we
keep hearing Canada needs - import them or train them. And Canada is doing
both. But we face a bottleneck in universities, which can't train technology
wo ...
1/Nov/2000 Don't cut education funding: Bombardier president
Bombardier president Robert Brown says if Quebec wants to keep its
aerospace and other high-tech industries humming, it will have to
correct the excesses of wholesale education budget cuts.
[FULL CBC STORY]
Benard Landry & JAY BRYAN on
The Mosel Vitelic Inc. Taiwanese Memory Chip Plant?
$3-billion factory 1,500 jobs and 6,500 indirect jobs
But what if, in the next down draft, they fail... is the risk too high?
Canada's Brain Drain
Saturday 12 August 2000 Site probes Canada's brain drain
While the debate over whether Canada is experiencing a true brain drain to the
U.S. has gone on for years, the creator of a thinks she has an easy
way for people to discuss what's alluring and frightening about moving south.
Thursday 17 August 2000 DAVID BERCUSON history professor at the University of Calgary and BARRY COOPERa professor of political science. Massive fundraising campaigns will not solve the university brain-drain problem except, perhaps, to endow a small number of chairs for
top-ranked scholars. There is no private-sector solution to this problem.
This argument really isn't about a brain drain. It's about politics and who
can be blamed for what. Business deans think (and they are right) that
corporations will care if Canada loses a few star business profs to the
U.S. But business schools don't exist alone in the universe: they are
part of a larger university system. So the real question is not whether
Canada is losing irreplaceable talent to the U.S. The real question is
whether anyone cares if a new generation of Canadian historians,
political scientists, philosophers or poets - and not just business profs -
comes along as we old geezers die off.
Thursday 25 May 2000 Brain drain real, StatsCan admits
But agency's nonchalance is nonsense JAY BRYAN.. the Conference Board of Canada last year
found that the number of departures might have jumped six-fold, to as
much as 98,000 in 1998
StatsCan's Canada's population emigrating to the United States shot
up by more than 20 per cent during the 1990s, one-eighth of all the 1995 PhD graduates
in Canada now live in the United States. Nearly half of these were in the
top 10 per cent of their graduating class. That
emigrants have much higher incomes and educations than most
Canadians.
Tuesday 17 August 1999 Denying brain drain just got harder JAY BRYAN When one of the most respected think-tanks in the country made public yesterday
a 35-page report concluding that the so-called brain drain of highly trained
Canadians to the U.S. not only exists, but threatens this country's future, Prime
Minister Jean Chretien was ready with a quick, dismissive rejoinder.
"Everybody has his own statistics on that," Chretien said. Quite true, and
Chretien's government can take most of the credit for this confusing state of
affairs. Perhaps because today's wave of emigration is one reflection of the
damage done to the Canadian economy by high tax rates, the Chretien
government has twisted itself into a logical pretzel in order to deny that it exists.
Monday 6 December 1999 U.S. firms cherry-picking Canadian brains off Net ERIC BEAUCHESNE
The Canadian government is concerned that U.S. firms are using the
Internet to cherry-pick Canada's best and brightest before Canadian
employers can recruit them, an international think-tank says.(saved)
"Large numbers of Canadian post-secondary students and alumni are
now signing up with and posting their resumes on the U.S.-based IRI
(Internet recruiting information) services," says a report by the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Wednesday 27 October 1999 Failing our universities Upon becoming Quebec's education minister last December, Francois Legault declared he wanted to restore the province's 17 universities to
financial health - a sharp departure from the indifference of his
predecessor, Pauline Marois. Yesterday, Mr. Legault laid out a recovery
plan.
The Canada Survey published by The Economist (July 24th 1999 issue) notes the
following:
"... it seems only natural that the flow of goods turned on by NAFTA should
be accompanied by a flow of people... from north to south, given the size
and energy of America's economy compared with Canada's. This southward flow
has been eased by changes in U.S. immigration law after the signing of the
FTA and NAFTA; thanks to the establishment of a new temporary worker status
(TN-1), an employer no longer has to prove that giving a job to a Canadian
worker will have no adverse effect on American workers. A Canadian worker
can present himself and his paperwork at the border and be granted TN-1
status within the hour. This status, valid for a year, can be renewed
indefinitely...."
Tuesday 24 August 1999
Quebec looks at bonuses to try to stem brain drain
The provincial government is looking at paying cash bonuses to
sought-after academics as part of a strategy to prevent the exodus of
Quebec's best and brightest minds.
But that view is short-sighted and fails to deal with the root cause of
the brain drain, university representatives said.
"There is no panacea. We need to create a basket of conditions to attract and keep researchers in Quebec," Rochon said yesterday.
The government hopes to have more answers in the spring, when it tables its scientific research policy, a substantial part of which will be dedicated to brain drain.
About 1,500 professors have left in the last five years in Quebec, mostly through retirement, he said. They haven't been replaced. "It's as if we just got rid of an institution the size of Universite du Quebec a Montreal."
Gloss Is Off
All of Quebec's universities have seen appreciable funding cuts in the
last decade. Laval receives $70 million a year less in government funding
than it did in 1989.
A board study showed that in the late 1980s, the number of Canadians
emigrating to the U.S. was about 17,000 a year. By 1997, the figure
jumped to 98,000, including a large increase in the number of
non-permanent emigrants.
TIME MARCH 29, 1999
A Tale of Two Universities
The Shapiros of McGill and Princeton
warn of a crisis in education
Harold, Bernard's fraternal
twin, is president of Princeton University. And the
difficulty, at first glance, of distinguishing one
63-year-old sibling from the other is an ironic
echo of the illusion that North America's
institutions of higher education are one happy
family.
The Shapiros' grim analysis comes as Canada's
85 universities face a deep crunch. According to
the Association of Universities and Colleges of
Canada, government spending on higher
education declined 8% between 1995 and 1998.
U.S. spending increased 20% over the same
period
"But if we wait much longer,
the trend will become irreversible, and our
students won't be able to compete." Nor will their
alma maters have much to offer.
The Shapiros warned that Canada's publicly
funded higher education is no longer tenable
compared with the U.S. mix of public and private
institutions. Roughly two-thirds of 3,700 U.S.
universities are private, and their alumni generate
a huge educational dividend. Princeton's $5.4
billion endowment alone is greater than Nova
Scotia's 1997 budget. Why not, they suggested,
permit some of Canada's schools to go private, to
become as competitive (and expensive) as their
elite U.S. counterparts? "We've had excellence
on the cheap until now," says Bernard, who
rocked McGill by suggesting tuition increases
and an upgrading of admission policies.
What's needed is more of the Shapiros'
family-style networking. Canada, the U.S. and
Mexico should cooperate in training a pool of
students for success in the global economy. The
European Union has moved toward establishing
just such a regional educational system. But it
won't happen until Canadian illusions of
educational parity are replaced by cool-eyed
realism.
Tuesday 17 August 1999
Denying brain drain just got harder
When one of the most respected think-tanks in the country made public yesterday a 35-page report concluding that the so-called brain drain of highly trained Canadians to the U.S. not only exists, but threatens this country's future, Prime Minister Jean Chretien was ready with a quick, dismissive rejoinder.
"Everybody has his own statistics on that," Chretien said. Quite true, and Chretien's government can take most of the credit for this confusing state of affairs. Perhaps because today's wave of emigration is one reflection of the damage done to the Canadian economy by high tax rates, the Chretien government has twisted itself into a logical pretzel in order to deny that it exists.
How strange. Although his government's financial management has been good enough that Chretien today has room to provide both tax cuts and a healthy level of social and health spending, this old-style Liberal is not content to take credit for his accomplishment and to ease the burden on citizens whose sacrifices, after all, made it possible.
Nope, even though the Canadian standard of living has fallen farther and farther behind that in the U.S. over the past decade, Chretien seems to think that taxpayers hanker to finance new big-spending programs for which he imagines he will get credit.
"I think the quality of life in Canada is pretty good and the people love to be in Canada and a lot are coming to Canada to live here," says Shawinigan's answer to Marie Antoinette. After all, Chretien noted recently, why would people move to the U.S. when emigrants have no health care and must cower in their homes to avoid a plague of crime.
How sad to see the leader of one of the world's major democracies descend to the kind of defensive fear-mongering usually associated with minor dictators whose regimes are under pressure.
In this atmosphere of partisan disinformation, it's high time somebody placed the whole issue of the brain drain and the comparative quality of life in Canada and the U.S. in careful perspective. And happily, the Conference Board of Canada has obliged.
Mahmood Iqbal, a Conference Board researcher who has been one of the most reliable sources of analysis as the brain-drain debate simmered and finally boiled over, has pulled together an overview of emigration trends buttressed by careful new research.
Iqbal's key conclusion: that the annual outflow of highly skilled Canadians has rocketed to more than five times the level seen in the late 1980s. His latest figures put the number of permanent and temporary emigrants at a stunning 98,000 in 1997, up from about 17,000 a year in the late 1980s.
What's more, this jump is not some temporary social or economic blip. It is a growing phenomenon being driven by a severe relative deterioration in Canada's ability to offer a high quality of life to its best-educated citizens. "Emigrants are very responsive to a higher income, lower taxes and better job opportunities," writes Iqbal. "All economic factors that influence the decision to move are in favour of the U.S."
What about Chretien's vivid picture of the hellish life Canadians must endure if they do move south of the border? The kernel of truth on which it is based is irrelevant to engineers, doctors, nurses and scientists.
Not only is it the norm for U.S. high-tech companies to pay for employees' health insurance, but governments actually spend more on health care in the U.S. than in Canada, although the health delivery system is probably even worse than ours.
The crime rate? It's actually higher in the urban areas where Canadian high-tech employers are concentrated than in the U.S. suburbs where most U.S. high-tech employers can be found, Iqbal discovered.
Of course, the Conference Board's study is not the only one by a non-partisan group and a few others have reached much more reassuring conclusions.
Statistics Canada, for example, has been denying the existence of a problem for the past two years. Unfortunately, its work is largely discredited because it is so flawed. Beyond serious technical errors, it is based on the astonishing assumption that rising emigration to the U.S. is no problem as long as immigration from poorer countries fills the gap.
This is like adding up apples and oranges. Canada has long been roughly comparable in living standards with the U.S., so it tells us a lot about the Canadian quality of life if more and more of us suddenly decide to leave.
Canada's ability to open the immigration floodgates to engineers and doctors from much poorer countries, on the other hand, merely means we can still offer more economic opportunity than Poland or Bangladesh. We should be properly grateful for our good fortune, but it certainly doesn't signify economic progress.
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