This is part one of The Logic’s in-depth series exploring how Canada is faring in the global competition for tech talent, as economies reopen and companies and governments jockey for advantage in a remote-work world. Read the rest of the series here.

OTTAWA — There’s a custom at Ada’s regular company-wide virtual meetings, in which colleagues praise each other for actions that embody the chatbot scale-up’s ethos. These days, those plaudits are coming in from far beyond its Toronto headquarters, as seen earlier this year from a member of the sales team. “He’s walking in northern British Columbia, in the forest with his dog, and he’s doing a shoutout from this, just, majestic landscape,” recalled CEO Mike Murchison.

Like many companies, Ada shifted to remote work by necessity as COVID-19 spread, and is now “digital-first” by choice. But just as Canadian startups and scale-ups are increasingly looking further afield for workers, “the world is looking at our talent,” said Joseph Fung, CEO of Waterloo, Ont.-based Uvaro.

Tech talent is now a global game. Governments around the world are looking to innovate their way out of COVID-19 recessions and increasingly, digital companies are competing across borders. Canada has made changes to expedite the hiring of such workers, and innovation-economy founders and groups say the re-elected Liberals need to maintain and expand those pathways. 

Pre-pandemic, Canadian startup and scale-up executives regularly reported challenges finding people for open spots on their teams, particularly technical roles. Even as COVID-19 layoffs swept other fields, the ranks of engineers and developers continued to swell. Nearly 1.1 million people worked in professional occupations in natural and applied sciences as of this August, up 15.9 per cent from February 2020, according to Statistics Canada data.

While non-technical staff bore the brunt of the innovation economy’s pandemic cuts, companies across the space are hiring again in earnest. Employment in the computer systems design and related services sector—what Indeed Canada senior economist Brendon Bernard calls “the centre of the tech world”—had grown by 12.4 per cent from February 2020 through this June. “There is a lot of demand to hire in the sector,” said Bernard. On Indeed, “job postings [for] roles like software engineering [and] data-related roles [are] really strong, well above their pre-pandemic levels.”

Where those employers expect their new hires to be located is changing, as is from where those candidates are looking to come. “Remote work is a frequent thing that appears in job postings,” said Bernard, noting a bevy of surveys showing most employees operating from home during the pandemic don’t want to go back to offices full time. And open positions here are attracting plenty of interest from jobseekers elsewhere—as of July, a fifth of Indeed’s clicks on Canadian postings for technical roles came from abroad. 

Vendasta has long looked for new hires beyond its home turf in Saskatoon. “We have a ton of raw talent at the junior level—the [University of Saskatchewan’s] got a fantastic comp-science department,” said CEO Brendan King. But the Prairie city is less stocked with candidates with product management and marketing expertise, or executives with experience scaling companies. So pre-pandemic, Vendasta brought in foreign workers via Canada’s fast-track program for tech talent, and hired senior staff in Seattle, Chicago and other U.S. cities who flew in regularly.

Still, COVID-19 has changed the 525-person firm. It made remote work “a necessity,” said King, and the systems the firm put in place so that staff could keep working from anywhere now allow Vendasta to hire from anywhere, too. “It opens up the rest of the world to us.”

But the new possibilities cut both ways. While Silicon Valley giants have long had engineering shops and commercial offices here, Canadian startup and scale-up CEOs say foreign firms are now courting workers to come onboard remotely. “We lost a number of folks who stayed in Saskatoon, but are now working for U.S. firms, because the U.S. dollar is really strong,” said King, who called for Ottawa to introduce an immigration grant or a tax rebate to equalize the currency differential.

Engineers and developers aren’t the only ones in demand. Uvaro runs 12-week training courses for inside sales and customer-success roles at tech companies. Per capita, the number of such postings are twice as high in Canada as in the U.S, according to Fung. “A large part of that is driven by U.S. companies that are posting roles targeting Canadian geographies.”

Not every innovation-economy occupation is making the global leap, but the pandemic has affected them all the same. The tech-related jobs that remain the most location-linked are ones that tack software onto physical labour—food-delivery and ride-hailing drivers, or e-commerce warehouse workers. The pandemic has accelerated the digitization of retail and increased demand for doorstep services, so platforms need to sign up more people to sort, drive and deliver. But it’s also thrown many out of work, so competition for gigs may increase.

“Canada has got to be among the top locations for global talent,” said William Kerr, a professor at Harvard Business School, citing greater public and political receptiveness to immigration than other popular destination countries. Compared to “the period right before Brexit, I don’t know that we’re back to that level” of ease of movement in the wider world.

Thousands of workers and students came to Canada from or instead of the U.S. during the Trump administration, according to government data and academic studies. While the Biden administration has taken a more welcoming tone than its predecessor, it has yet to make major changes to the country’s immigration policies or system, according to Kerr. 

Smaller, more cohesive countries can engage in “immigration engineering,” testing out and tweaking policies for economic advantage, he said. Canada, for example, introduced a fast-track program for skilled foreign workers in June 2017, initially as a pilot; tens of thousands of tech professionals have since used it.

But the country’s advantage might not last long. While the U.K. has imposed new immigration restrictions post-Brexit, it’s developing its own fast-track visas for “elite researchers and specialists in science, engineering and technology,” as well as new hires at fintech firms. Singapore has also launched a work-permit program for tech talent. Meanwhile, expatriates are returning to India and China—the largest sources of newcomers to Canada in recent years—as their respective tech ecosystems boom and create new opportunities.

Back at Ada, the 300-plus-person workforce now includes executives in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Seattle, and staff as far from its headquarters as the Philippines. Murchison wants to keep it this way. “It’s much easier to hire a super-talented, diverse team when you aren’t constrained by geography.”