Quote:
Originally Posted by P'tit Renard
But for a lot of professional roles these days, especially in the tech and FIRE industries, salaries aren't matching dollar for dollar. What pays CAD80,000 in Canada often times is already paying out in the low 6-digits in the US, plus you can shelter more income through married joint tax filings (something Trudeau took away after Harper implemented a version of it), more generous 401K deductions, excellent healthcare coverage etc, some states don't even tax income (i.e. Seattle, Texas, Florida, Nevada). This also goes for Canadian HQ'd firms, and why many young savvy Torontonians are jumping on the chance of an L1 Visa to NYC/Cali/Texas/Seattle/DC.
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Ditto for physicians, especially for in demand specialists and subspecialists.
Canadian hospitals are poorly funded and falling apart. Equipment is not being replaced in a timely manner (often in use for 25 years or more), meaning the equipment is obsolete and unreliable for years before a replacement is judged unavoidable. The installed equipment base is also inadequate. My hospital has one 1.5T MRI, when if it were located in the US, it would have 3-5 MRIs, at least 1-2 of which would be 3.0T capable of functional neuroimaging. We are rapidly reaching the point where medical care in Canada is no longer "state of the art."
At the same time, physician compensation is not keeping up, and, JT has compounded things by removing almost all advantages we used to have by personal incorporation. This used to partially compensate for the salary differences between Canada and the US, but, not any more.
Canadian physicians are paid less, get to work with inadequate obsolete equipment, and are stuck with intolerable queues for laboratory and imaging studies. They are not able to provide timely services to their patients, with surgical wait times for some procedures being 18-24 months, or, even longer.
The government has made a push to improve things for meat and potato procedures like hip and knee replacement surgery, but, overall surgical capacity has not changed, meaning that less frequently performed surgical procedures are often sidelined. Patients with these conditions are neglected by the system.
Physicians are starting to move to the US again, and I suspect we may reach similar heights that we saw back in the 1990s. As I've said before, if I wasn't retiring in two years time, I would be looking into moving myself........