The Club PUBlication 12/15/2025

Scientists are told: 
​‘Come to Canada’
$1 billion effort aims to attract researchers, including from the U.S.
By MATINA STEVIS-GRIDNEFF The New York Times

CANADIAN PARLIMENT IN SESSION

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TORONTO - Canada is making an aggressive effort to attract highly skilled researchers from around the world, including H-1B visa holders in the United States who are coming under growing pressure because of the Trump administration's restrictive immigration policies and cuts to research funding.

The Canadian government said Tuesday it would spend more than $1 billion over the next few years to attract and retain scientists from around the world, including those at major hospitals and universities.
It also said that in coming months it would create an "accelerated pathway" for U.S. H-1B visa holders. H-1B visas are issued to highly skilled people working for American companies and are concentrated in major industries that compete for global talent, such as technology and medicine.

"As other countries constrain academic freedoms and undermine cutting-edge research, Canada is investing, and doubling down, on science," Mélanie Joly, Canada's industry minister, said in written comments to the press, without explicitly mentioning the United States.

In an interview with the Times on Tuesday, Joly said that the new money would create 100 new research chairs, by funding not just individual senior researchers at the top of those efforts, but their entire teams and labs.

She said her top priority was to lure back Canadian researchers.
"For decades, Canada has had a brain drain issue, and now we are in a brain gain mode," Joly said. "My message to Canadians around the world is: It's time to come home."

But she added that the push to attract top global researchers was also about creating a stable environment for those wanting to move to Canada.

"If you want to live in the best country on the Earth, that is also the safest, and the one that will actually respect your work and offer you the right environment to flourish, well, come to Canada," she said.
The question of H-1B visa holders, on whom the U.S. tech industry, in particular, relies, has opened a fault line within President Donald Trump's base and unsettled planning in the tech, pharmaceutical and other highly competitive industries.

Influential figures in the tech world, such as Elon Musk, fiercely support maintaining the pathway for high-skilled immigrants, while others from the so-called MAGA movement demand that the number of H-1B visas be slashed alongside all other types of immigration into the United States.
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The questions around the long-term prospects of highly skilled immigrants in the United States create an opportunity for Canada and other developed economies to attract some top scientists concerned about their status in the U.S. or affected by the Trump administration's cuts to research funding.