As someone who went through the 'entrepreneur route', which is not what this start-up visa thingy is but it was a related program, it's still Canada and it is still the Canadian government, as well as Canadian immigration:
Canada is a great country, lots of really nice people and amazing scenery. Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal (order of personal preference for running a business) all have sizeable tech scenes and all have a reasonably good access to the US market.
If you're Canadian you can very easily leverage your position into one that translates into most of the pros and very few of the cons of living on the North American continent.
If you're an outsider planning to move in things are substantially different. The first thing that you'll notice is that there is a sizeable industry that exists just to make money off new arrivals (aka immigration lawyers and associated services). There are a lot of gotchas that nobody informs you about (such as, for Ontario, applying for OHIP coverage immediately upon arrival, wait one day too long and you're in deep trouble), there a lot of silly rules and regulations that won't make sense to you if you're not from a country that qualifies as a 'nanny state' and there is a lot to be learned about banking and your 'credit score' if you are not Canadian and you do not have any history. Banks are really hard to get any reasonable performance out of, there are too few of them and their offerings are too uniform.
The Canadian government is saying 'A' but will actually do 'B', and it will do this at length. In my case, with a guaranteed landed immigrant status in the year 2002 it took until 2007 for me to finally give up on the whole process and move back to Europe.
By then I'd had enough of the Canadian authorities and the fact that there are only two seasons, winter and construction. If the government had kept their promises of speedy processing for me and my dependants I'd be singing 'Oh Canada' right now and I would have taken the snow into the bargain. As it was, losing half a year per year to the elements (the first two years were spent in Toronto, the last 3 on an island near Sault ste. Marie), having to deal with uncertainty from the governments side, a dog-eat-dog attitude when it comes to making money with people (which turns into making money off each other if you're not very careful), a school that was outwardly secular but internally dominated by religion and many more issues I'm reasonably happy to be back in Europe.
There is lots of stuff wrong here but at least my status here is not questioned with every move I make.
Fun fact: two weeks after shutting down the Canadian company, firing everybody and moving back they came through with the paperwork and asked if we would please come back...
Take home lesson: Beware of promises by the Canadian government, especially when it comes to giving landed immigrant status to foreigners (forget about citizenship, that's a different kettle of fish), even ones that bring tons of business with them. The best I ever got out of them was a work permit for me, but not for my spouse. Be prepared to be kept waiting (quite possibly for a great many years), and be prepared to file ever more paperwork at great expense and expect the game to change while you're playing it. Great Eh? ;)
It's not much different in the USA, at least when it comes to the H1B > Green Card > Citizenship route. I've gone through two H1B applications (first time and renewal) and one Green Card application, and every single time the USCIS put me and my company through the RFE (request for evidence) process, where they ask for additional evidence that I am qualified to work at my position and that the company did not prefer me over American applicants. Which meant even more overhead for company lawyers and HR people, plus more legal fees. I managed to get my H1B renewed, still waiting on the Green Card decision (if it gets approved I have to wait another 5-6 years before I actually get it).
And note that I've been wanting to start my own business all this time, but I can't. In fact, it would be tremendously difficult for me to switch jobs. Which makes me an indentured servant of this company until I get my green card and therefore my freedom to set my own course.
> And note that I've been wanting to start my own business all this time, but I can't. In fact, it would be tremendously difficult for me to switch jobs. Which makes me an indentured servant of this company until I get my green card and therefore my freedom to set my own course.
I was in exactly the same situation (Canadian on H1B) but am lucky enough to be married to an Aussie, so two years ago we moved Down Under where I had permanent residency from day one and complete freedom to work for any company, or start up my own.
Last year I got SlickDNS, a managed DNS hosting service, up and running (https://www.slickdns.com/) and I have other ideas that I'm working on.
It's tremendously liberating after the straightjacket of the H1B.
This is rather misleading. The average processing time for Canadian citizenship remains 21 months. There is a residency requirement that applicants live 1,095 days (a full three years) in Canada before applying.
Some require a residency follow-up, because there are people who cheat the residency requirement, forging paperwork to pretend to have lived in Canada, etc. This is only a minority of cases. There's an average of 172,000 new citizens to Canada each year, which is huge.
i've been a canadian permanent resident since 1982 and i've been in the citizenship process since 1998 with very little forward movement. inquiries and hefty lawyer bills just get me "working on it" as an answer
canada is lovely, but the beauracracy is out of control
US citizen living in Victoria here -- the west coast of Canada is pretty fantastic in many ways, but the availability of quality tech jobs takes a sharp nosedive once you leave Toronto, as far as I've been able to tell. It could be interesting if Startup Visa immigrants chose to move this direction (not only for "quality of life" reasons but also to be geographically closer to Seattle/Portland/SanFran), but I wouldn't surprised in the least if they flock to Toronto because everyone wants to belong to the larger tech scene to attract talent and connections.
You're thinking of the old Entrepreneur Program, that'd been around since the 1970s, and is now under a moratorium. As mentioned in a different comment here, that program was substantially different.
This new program, for one, includes permanent residency and is the first such program in the developed world to do so for entrepreneurs. It puts an end to what many countries (and indeed Canada until now) had, which was to offer the uncertainty of bureaucracy where one's long-term residency was concerned. Not exactly inviting, hey?
What I thought neat during the announcement yesterday was that they recognize that some startup business float while others sink, but your permanent residence status doesn't get taken away if your business sinks.
Canada is a great country, lots of really nice people and amazing scenery. Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal (order of personal preference for running a business) all have sizeable tech scenes and all have a reasonably good access to the US market.
If you're Canadian you can very easily leverage your position into one that translates into most of the pros and very few of the cons of living on the North American continent.
If you're an outsider planning to move in things are substantially different. The first thing that you'll notice is that there is a sizeable industry that exists just to make money off new arrivals (aka immigration lawyers and associated services). There are a lot of gotchas that nobody informs you about (such as, for Ontario, applying for OHIP coverage immediately upon arrival, wait one day too long and you're in deep trouble), there a lot of silly rules and regulations that won't make sense to you if you're not from a country that qualifies as a 'nanny state' and there is a lot to be learned about banking and your 'credit score' if you are not Canadian and you do not have any history. Banks are really hard to get any reasonable performance out of, there are too few of them and their offerings are too uniform.
The Canadian government is saying 'A' but will actually do 'B', and it will do this at length. In my case, with a guaranteed landed immigrant status in the year 2002 it took until 2007 for me to finally give up on the whole process and move back to Europe.
By then I'd had enough of the Canadian authorities and the fact that there are only two seasons, winter and construction. If the government had kept their promises of speedy processing for me and my dependants I'd be singing 'Oh Canada' right now and I would have taken the snow into the bargain. As it was, losing half a year per year to the elements (the first two years were spent in Toronto, the last 3 on an island near Sault ste. Marie), having to deal with uncertainty from the governments side, a dog-eat-dog attitude when it comes to making money with people (which turns into making money off each other if you're not very careful), a school that was outwardly secular but internally dominated by religion and many more issues I'm reasonably happy to be back in Europe.
There is lots of stuff wrong here but at least my status here is not questioned with every move I make.
Fun fact: two weeks after shutting down the Canadian company, firing everybody and moving back they came through with the paperwork and asked if we would please come back...
Take home lesson: Beware of promises by the Canadian government, especially when it comes to giving landed immigrant status to foreigners (forget about citizenship, that's a different kettle of fish), even ones that bring tons of business with them. The best I ever got out of them was a work permit for me, but not for my spouse. Be prepared to be kept waiting (quite possibly for a great many years), and be prepared to file ever more paperwork at great expense and expect the game to change while you're playing it. Great Eh? ;)