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Originally Posted by isaidso
... Amazon is a global company and many global companies are run out of Toronto. Pearson airport has more global connections than any other airport in north America except JFK. Millions of business trips between Canada and the world (US included) are made every year. Many regular fliers apply for special passports that fast track them through customs. ...
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Pearson Airport is #2 in North America in international traffic maybe because of .. tons of flights to the US? You'd have to exclude all that US traffic if you sought an apples-apples comparison. Naturally, your statistic also excludes EWR, for example. The list of air destinations is a little underwhelming.
The friction in crossing borders is not solved with just magic visas or fast track for workers. It's about their family members making periodic visits -- many will remain in the US as elderly or as children attending school. It's for vendors and clients coming for meetings, often impromptu. It's about students coming to tour or interview. It's about journalists, or people attending conferences and seminars. And often these visits occur with urgency; imagine a family emergency, and you can't get grandma into Canada to cover for dad while he tends to mom in the hospital, etc. Families making relocation decisions worry about things like that. Or about ordinary baggage items causing a customs snag. Of course there are lots of border crossings already made every day at Windsor, Niagara, etc., but the majority are people accustomed to or prepared for the drill; many of the examples I just gave involve one-offs because of the nature of a company like Amazon. Then imagine a terrorist incident occurs, and suddenly the US borders get sealed for a couple days. You'll recall the US does have fluctuating paranoia about borders lately. Finally, fumbling with two currencies is not a minor matter, even in the electronic payments age.
Now let's complicate it further. I recently learned that Canada refuses entry to anybody who has had a DUI in the past 10 years (or, ever?), even if arriving by air and not driving. Canada should do whatever it sees fit, but to most people that's a totally random rule; there would be plenty of people needing to go for a meeting -- or visiting a family member -- who suddenly have to tell their bosses they can't go because an Uber never showed up seven years ago one night after having a second glass of wine. There are lots of avid skiers who simply have never made it to Whistler for this reason. It is also easy to see further "suspicious crimes" being added to the list; what about convictions for arson when participating in a mass protest against a pipeline or statue, etc.? Again, control borders as you please, but don't think it'll be easy on a giant multinational corporation with frequently relocating families and its main HQ in the US.
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Access to US politics, culture? Canada has a window seat to what happens next door. We get minute by minute updates all year long (just like Americans). Canadian and US culture are one in the same and it's been that way since the New World was all just 'America' back in the 1600s. Canadians get every single media outlet Americans get + we get Canadian, British, and French on top of that. If anything, Canada is a bonus to a global corporation because the outlook is more international in scope. ... Lastly, you think the only thing on tv in Canada is hockey and parliamentary channels? We've been living in a 500 channel universe for 30 years. 20% of the shows you watch are made here, for heaven's sake.
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Well it's not about whether those things are available; it's about what kind of mindshare they occupy. It is human nature to localize yourself and assimilate into the culture around you, so people will be attuned to different sensibilities, unless they really try to focus on US issues. I have no idea if that will be mostly irrelevant to whatever this HQ's activities will be (it could be a back office), but at fifty thousand people I doubt they can ignore all the various facets of their home market.
I very much agree with you however if this HQ's goal is to be more sensitized to things happening overseas; the US mindset is extremely inward looking and provincially minded, no matter what city you pick, so Toronto would be great as an office overseeing operations in other countries.
Back to the differences in the countries' legal systems that could literally land unsuspecting employees in jail or with big penalties: It seems that Canada doesn't have robust protections on freedom of speech. I understand there is a new law punishing the incorrect usage of a gender pronoun. Punishing speech is a slippery slope; it's very easy to see bans five or ten or twenty years down the road against microagressions against religious, or ethnic minorities, etc. Freedom of speech and thought are the bedrock of the bedrock in the US (social pressure is preferred instead of laws), so this trend is unthinkably regressive. Speaking of language by the way, would every official piece of paper, and every sign, in the HQ2 be required by law to be written in French and English? I hope Amazon has some big operations in Canada, but for an HQ2 caliber office I see many headaches.
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