Fifteen years ago Caleb Howard could have been a poster boy for Canada’s brain drain epidemic. In 1993 the University of Waterloo-trained mathematician and computer animator visited Los Angeles and was stunned by what he saw. Movie studios were clamouring for workers with his skills, and they were willing to pay three times more than companies in Toronto. So Howard joined thousands of other highly skilled Canadians who flocked to the U.S. in the 1990s. He went on to design special effects for video games and blockbuster movies—he’s particularly proud of the fire and smoke he fashioned for the rocket-launch scene in Apollo 13—and built a prosperous life with his Canadian wife and their two children in Santa Monica. From time to time, the topic of returning to Canada came up. But California’s unbridled energy and sense of opportunity made it difficult to leave.
Early last year, all that began to change. Signs of the coming economic crisis were everywhere. House prices were plunging, and so too were the couple’s retirement savings. Soon even their well-educated friends were struggling to find work. As the energy fizzled and jobs dried up, the couple sold their home. Then, just like 14 years earlier, they packed up and headed to where the opportunities looked most promising: only this time, that meant Canada. “It was with an acute awareness of the decline of the American economic situation that we came back,” says Howard, now a computer graphics supervisor at Electronic Arts in Burnaby, B.C. “We couldn’t have picked a better place to return to.”
For Canada, a country that has spent the better part of 20 years nervously wringing its hands over its perceived inadequacies, the dramatic reversal over the past year has been striking. Our banks were once seen as lacking innovation; now world leaders hail the boring Big Five as being among some of the safest and most profitable banks in the world. We fretted that our economy was overly reliant on commodities; now our rocks, oil and gas are seen as a natural hedge against havoc in the manufacturing sector. We worried that Canada’s strict mortgage rules were a drag on our housing market; now we can brag that we don’t put people into homes they can’t afford. Almost any way you look at it, Canada is uniquely positioned. So as other developed nations struggle, the question is: will we squander this once-in-a-generation opportunity or take advantage of our good fortune to punch above our weight?
“You’d have to go back to those golden early Trudeau years of ’69, ’70 to find a time when things were aligned so well,” says Glen Hodgson, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada. Last week the board predicted that next year Canada will see a huge leap in our ranking by international economic performance, from 11th place out of 17 countries in 2008, to fifth. Canada’s rise will be driven by GDP growth, improved employment growth and increased foreign investment.
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