Is Canada Trying to Recruit U.S. Professors?
Graduate students, keep Canada in mind.
It’s not just you. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been getting ads, emails, and even phone calls from Canadian institutions trying to recruit researchers. Turns out this is part of a much bigger story, and U.S. academics are squarely in the middle of it.
Canada is making significant investments in research and is targeting U.S.-based academics.
Canada has launched a C$1.7 billion effort to attract top global researchers. They’re pairing it with fast-track immigration for PhDs and H-1B visa holders, and new funding lines for postdocs in climate science, quantum computing, and other high-growth fields. The goal is to recruit 1,000 researchers over the next 12 years.
All of this is happening while U.S. universities face a very different reality: funding uncertainty, political pressure, and cuts tied to the Trump administration’s stance on higher education, DEI, and academic freedom. Melanie Joly, Canada’s industry minister, said,
As other countries constrain academic freedoms and undermine cutting-edge research, Canada is investing in – and doubling down on – science.
Canada’s pitch to academics is simple: We’ll fund your research, protect academic freedom, and process your visa in 14 days.
Programs and Target Areas
Canada has introduced three programs designed to attract the best researchers:
These three new streams will target researchers in the following priority areas:
Advanced digital technologies (AI, quantum, cybersecurity)
Health, including biotechnology
Clean technology and resource value chains
Environment, climate resilience, and the Arctic
Food and water security
Democratic and community resilience
Manufacturing and advanced materials
Defence and dual-use technologies.
The government has also launched the Canada Impact+ Research Infrastructure Fund to help institutions cover related expenses for the intake of new researchers. The fund will invest $400 million CAD over the next six years.
This is brilliant and great timing by Canada. American higher education institutions are struggling. MIT, for example, is staring at a $300 million budget shortfall, and researchers across the U.S. are bracing for reduced federal support. Canadian institutions see an opening, even though they’ve historically struggled to retain highly skilled immigrants over the long term due to slower wage growth.
But right now, they’re leaning in. Hard.
For decades, the U.S. dominated academia due to its depth of funding, research infrastructure, and prestige. But the Trump administration has destabilized the research environment, and Canada is seeking to capitalize on this by attracting top talent. Although new, it appears to be working. The University of Toronto announced in November that it recruited three top researchers from U.S. institutions whose work ranges from the search for new planets to economics.
The economics are straightforward. Academia requires funding, and researchers will follow the access to resources. Research is long-term and requires certainty, and that is hard to find in the U.S. right now. As that talent shifts, new clusters of innovation will develop. If enough U.S. scholars leave, the spillovers, patents, labs, students, and startups will follow them, and Canada hopes they will settle in the north.
Bottom Line
Canada sees an opportunity to pull in a generation of U.S. academics. And based on the volume of outreach many of us are suddenly receiving, they aren’t being subtle about it. If you are a graduate student or an early-career researcher, keep Canada in mind.
To my academic colleagues: Are you seeing the same recruitment push? Email ads? Calls? Immigration-fast-track invitations? I’m curious how widespread this has become.
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It's not just them Denmark had an ad campaign on LinkedIn for half a year and Canada has poached some of our top history talent like Timothy Snyder. Age old example of incentives matter.
Combine that with our loss of the bright foreign students and you have a decades-long loss of intellectual property, discovery, and development. Can the US even imagine a more damaging policy?