This is part eight 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.

HALIFAX — In a student apartment tucked away in the south end of Halifax, 31-year-old Ashike Mahmud and his wife, Tahmina Gazi, work for Shopify, the e-commerce platform founded in Ottawa, 1,400 kilometres away from their home office.

Originally from Bangladesh, the couple came to Nova Scotia in 2019 as international graduate students and have been working for Shopify since they graduated. Mahmud studied computer science at Dalhousie University, while Gazi pursued business at Saint Mary’s University. Mahmud has been working remotely as a tech-support specialist, a job that allows him to, as he put it, work anywhere in Canada. But of all the places he could have chosen to live, Mahmud said he was particularly induced by Halifax’s proximity to nature and the local connections they were able to build. “I would only move out of Halifax if I could not manage my job,” he said.

Still, Mahmud and Gazi have been struggling to find a two-bedroom apartment in the city—one that could accommodate their work-from-home needs. The couple is currently living in a student building leased by the Halifax Student Housing Society, a non-profit organization that provides low-cost housing to married full-time students. Their lease ends in December. 

“Finding affordable accommodation in Halifax is tougher than anything,” Mahmud said, adding that they’ve been searching for a place for five months. 

Mahmud and Gazi are among many recent graduates across Nova Scotia whom Shopify hired as it shifted its headquarters to “Internet, Everywhere” during the pandemic. Although the e-commerce platform doesn’t have a physical branch in Halifax, it’s been working with local economic-development organizations including Halifax Partnership and Nova Scotia Business to recruit talent in the province over the last year. The company has hired over 85 junior support advisors in Halifax, according to the Halifax Partnership, all of whom work remotely.

It’s not the only company looking to tap into the city’s talent pool. Halifax, which once struggled to keep younger talent, is turning the tables with tech jobs as more firms set up shop in the region and bring career opportunities to the city. Among the 35 major cities in Canada, Halifax tied with Kitchener-Waterloo for the second-highest year-over-year population growth rate in July 2020, at 2.0 per cent, trailing only Oshawa, Ont., at 2.2 per cent. 

However, the population influx has contributed to higher housing prices in the region. The year-to-date average price of a home in Halifax-Dartmouth in October rose 28.8 per cent over the same period last year to $469,630, according to the Nova Scotia Association of Realtors. Affordable housing, rent control and a looming housing crisis were at the centre of this year’s provincial election debate. 

Besides the rising living costs, local Halifax employers are also facing competition from outside of the province as more businesses elsewhere have shifted to remote work.

“It’s excellent for the employees. It’s been made a little bit more challenging for hiring, but just makes us work a little harder to find the talent,” said Tim Richardson, operations manager of Jonas Software Solutions, one of 16 Canadian companies that expanded to Halifax between April 2020 and March 2021. 

Wendy Luther, president and CEO of Halifax Partnership, says competition from out-of-province employers has created “upward pressure” on salary expectations for local companies.

“Those individuals, to change jobs, if they’ve been working from home, not only did they not have to relocate their families, they don’t even have to stand up from their desk. They just log into a different system and off they go,” Luther said. 

Jonas’s approach to talent retention has been that proximity to a physical office could help attract workers amid the heated competition for talent. 

“I think that’s a benefit because if the only option you have is home and you don’t see anybody, some people might be OK, but there’s some people that don’t like that,” Richardson said. 

“They like to know, ‘I get to meet some of the people I work with,’ instead of just this way on a computer,” he said. He added that Jonas is focusing on building connections with its employees to help with attracting and retaining talent.

“We’ve done axe-throwing; we’ve done some other events and even some community-volunteer stuff,” he said. “I think people appreciate it when a company is focused on that. And again, that’s marketable; that’s joy.”

Rebekah Young, Scotiabank’s director of fiscal and provincial economics, said Halifax businesses have an advantage as work-from-home policies evolve and employers from city centres start to call people back. 

“If there’s this reversion of [going] back to the office … some who don’t want to make that shift may be prompted to change jobs in light of that. But that’s something to watch,” Young said. 

Despite these newer challenges that companies face, Halifax remains an appealing tech market to many. Since April, 15 companies have already made the decision to relocate to or expand in Halifax, seven of which are in the tech sector, according to Luther. 

In an analysis from commercial real estate firm CBRE, Halifax jumped from 12th in 2020 to seventh place this year in its 25 up-and-coming North American cities to watch for tech talent, outranking larger cities with nearly double the population, such as Las Vegas.

Online storytelling platform Wattpad chose Halifax over Calgary as the site of its second headquarters. It has 27 staff in the city, a spokesperson told The Logic, 80 per cent of whom work in technical roles.

The appeal of Halifax as a tech market is hardly preordained. Yet despite Nova Scotia’s outsized number of universities (10 universities with a population of less than a million), youth retention has been challenging. According to a June Statistics Canada study, Nova Scotia had the second-lowest student-retention rate of all the provinces between 2010 and 2016, with just 25 per cent of its international post-secondary students staying in the province, compared to the overall average of 47 per cent.

“Over the past 10 years, we’ve lost our local talent,” said Andrew Bergen, senior vice-president and managing director of CBRE’s operations in Atlantic Canada. “Recent graduates are going to Toronto, Vancouver or Calgary and pursuing careers in larger cities, chasing higher salaries and better opportunities.

“But now, we have those opportunities locally.”