Sabrina Maddeaux: Fix the brain drain by fixing Canada, not with a $500K exit tax

Cars wait in line to enter the United States at a border crossing at the Canada-US border in Blackpool, Quebec, Canada, on February 2, 2025. Photo by ANDREJ IVANOV/AFP via Getty Images

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Too many Canadian retirees spend far too much wealth outside our borders. The richest generation in Canadian history, who also happens to be the most heavily subsidized generation, has long enjoyed the luxury of snowbirding in the U.S. and regular trips abroad. But in an era of unprecedented economic uncertainty and risk, we can’t afford to be sending billions to other countries each year on luxury whims.

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Canadian snowbirds to Arizona alone move about $2.5 billion south annually. They hand over $6.5 billion to Florida in tourism dollars a year — and that’s not including the significant housing wealth stored outside the country and property taxes paid to other governments on second homes. Last week, the Globe and Mail reported retirees are struggling to stay within their overseas travel budgets of $10,000 to $15,000 a year, all of which flow outside our borders. This is capital that could be invested locally.

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Meanwhile, taxpayer-funded senior subsidies are ballooning, with Old Age Security (OAS) — the largest line item in the federal budget — projected at between $80 and $88 billion for 2025-26. Add in generous tax credits, health-care costs and policies to protect seniors’ lottery-like housing gains at the expense of broader affordability, and the bill goes so high it’s an astonishment the entire country hasn’t depressurized.

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It’s obvious that keeping retirees and their wads of cash at home is a national imperative, which is why any senior who wants to leave the country for non-essential travel should be taxed a $500,000 exit fee. This would recoup the costs of their taxpayer-subsidized wealth and health while incentivizing them to spend their travel budgets on more productive uses within Canada. Want to spend winter in Florida or cruise the Mediterranean? Great. But give us back our money.

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Now, before too many angry readers hit send on outraged letters to my poor editors, I’ll admit I’m not serious about this obviously absurd and authoritarian proposal. However, anyone who agrees on its absurdity should feel even more strongly about what one prominent speaker recommended on stage at the federal Liberal convention last weekend.

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Patrick Pichette, a venture capitalist and former senior vice-president at Google in California, suggested, in order to stem Canada’s brain-drain-turned-hemorrhaging of young professionals to the U.S., that any young Canadian interested in taking a job elsewhere be charged $500,000 upon exit. This napkin-math figure is his rather dubious estimate of how much a Canadian university student’s education is subsidized by taxpayers.

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“You want to go to the U.S.? Give me back my money,” he said. “Like my dad, my mom — you all work every day to offer them their education. You can’t let five billion or 10 billion a year of your hard-earned cash (go) so that Microsoft can get smarter.”

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The idea of essentially trapping all but the very wealthiest young people inside a country would be perfectly at home inside the world’s most authoritarian regimes. While there’s no indication this is a serious policy proposal under consideration by the Liberals, its presence in such a prominent forum encapsulates one of the most corrosive and dangerous ideas to go mainstream in Canadian politics over the last decade: that younger generations aren’t a future worth investing in and sacrificing for, but a resource to extract from.