alt Hacker NewsBecause US has far better opportunities and more money.
My personal experience in doing business in Canada: each industry is monopolized by two or three companies, you need to get their “blessing” before you can do anything in that sector. Government contracts aren’t much, but even with that, it’s nepotism based, you will get a contract knowing someone who will indirectly get benefits from you, for example you will hire people they know, so kinda laundering the money. Lengthy regulations, you might wait months to get an SFOC for example (in drones, where you might need a special flight operation certificate) to do a simple operation, only to repeat that for another test. Securing clients, a combination of low on money and usually clients prefer US based companies, your best bet is securing a big client that will be your backbone, so back to point one where you need a blessing from a big company. And Im talking here about a business where there’s an opportunity to scale up, so food truck business and the local plumbing work aren’t part of that.
Yep, ever the same since the Hudsons Bay Company and the Northwest Company ran the whole place.
Now it's just the Westons and Rogers and Bell instead.
Some years ago when I first moved to my farm out here in the Hamilton area there was a meeting about zoning bylaws, as the city was finally -- after 20 years -- harmonizing the rural zoning laws after the municipal amalgamation that Mike Harris had forced on them back in the late 90s.
We're on an A1 zoned farm lot, and I have a small hobby vineyard here, and although I don't have enough acreage myself to run a winery business, I was curious to see what the zoning around that was. But then I noticed that they had language in the zoning laws that explicitly restricted all winery / commercial vineyard operations to be only in the east of the city (Winona, east of Stoney Creek). I was baffled why they would restrict like that, actually have laws preventing you from running a business up here.
So I went to the zoning presentations / meetings and tried to talk to the city staff there about it. She looked at me completely incredulously like I was from Mars.
"That's because that's where the wineries are. Maybe we'd allow cider operations up there, but not wine."
Why on earth would you go out of your way to do that? If someone wants to try it, why stop them? She just took it for granted that their job was to enshrine the existing state of things in a formal law.
It's for some reason just the default Canadian mindset to create an environment to often favour the already entrenched, and to explicitly put gates in front of any upstarts.
It's not a partisan thing. It's not liberal vs conservative vs whatever. It's just some weird mindset that wants to see credentials for everything, and the best credential you can have is your proximity to already existing power privilege or wealth.
Best explanation I have is this is an outcropping of the colonial mindset.