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I've worked for a couple of startups in Montreal. Their biggest competitive advantage was always that they could do things for less. This is because wages are l

I've worked for a couple of startups in Montreal. Their biggest competitive advantage was always that they could do things for less. This is because wages are low and so is the cost of living. I don't think that undercutting your competitors is a viable long term business strategy since you end up being cheap labor. This also discourages innovation since the focus is on copying what someone has already done and doing it for less. There is already a lot of talent in Montreal but if Montreal is to become an open source startup hub, it needs to change this cheap labor mindset into one of innovation.

arach 16y ago
> it needs to change this cheap labor mindset into one of innovation. I agree with your point that Montreal needs to change its cheap labor mindset, but I'm pretty sure the innovation part is and always was very strong here. Thankfully, Canada's currency has reached parity with the US Dollar, in part because of Canada's stability during the clusterf*ck recession but mostly thanks to our country's vast natural resources. The dollar parity is forcing a lot of people to rethink the cheap labor approach, whether they like it or not. It was not so long ago that the US dollar was 1.5 Canadian dollars, but wages and costs were much less than 1.5x. The arbitrage opportunity was way too easy to ignore. That's over.