You overestimate the willingness of Canadian software engineer employers to pay anything beyond peanuts.

Any competent developer already immediately flees to the US to triple their take-home pay at first chance and Canadian employers are fully aware of this.

I know lots of competent developers in Canada. Some better than any I have yet met in the Bay area. They know they could triple their income by moving to the US, but they have other attachments, priorities, and concerns.

Lots do move to the US too, but it's a filter for ambition, not competence. Don't confuse the two.

They didn’t pay well before the AI hype, now software developers are seen far worse. The other day I was looking at embedded/robotics engineers jobs in canada, the salaries are CAD$60k to CAD$90k (far less than USD for who doesn’t know), and the job description I swear is enough to send rockets to the space, what an absolute joke. Meanwhile in the US they are paid $250k USD, with defined scope (say only vision or autonomy). Canada is a based on service economy, nursing or plumbing or similar will make better than staff software engineers, hell, a heavy equipment operator who moves few joysticks and listens to music all day make CAD$115k and unionized too.. and the delusionals think that will replace US decades of investment in tech industry while dancing to “elbows up!” in a festival.

The only way is Canada joining the EU in making their own tech, but even then, this will take at least a decade to materialize, if any, don’t forget all infrastructure hardware is still US, hp/dell/nvidia/etc plus decades of software and OSes, so yeah.