> Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).

That's actually not true for most of those countries. None of those countries other than maybe China have laws requiring encryption backdoors.

Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.

The premise seems wrong here. As someone who worked my whole career in Canadian tech I assure you it exists.

A lot of the Indian tech industry is really just the tech industry from other countries being outsourced to there.

And why, pray tell, is that the case? Because the Liberal government has created a terrible environment for Canadian businesses over the last 11 years, ballooning the size of the public service and the amount of regulations and bureaucratic oversight, as well as trying to pick winners by handing out subsidies to all the wrong companies in service of their ideological agenda. They would rather companies fail than succeed without their "help". That, and they've done everything in their power to keep the housing bubble juiced instead of allowing an RE correction. But hey, running the country into the ground while trying to blame everything on the orange man gets you elected, so I don't expect any course correction.

> Heck, China, Israel, and India all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements.

It's almost like all three of those involve absolutely enormous captive markets, including for their defence/espionage purposes.

> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.

Off-topic but I suspect it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes. Canadian investors are risk adverse because they can be. That and there's a colonial-descended cultural bias towards credentials and established players.

But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings, and would love to get investment to build a startup off of it, but every time I sniff around the Canadian "investor" scene it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me.