There's always a quality of life aspect, the ability to get future funding, the ability to get students and researchers, the ability to travel/present. Academi

There's always a quality of life aspect, the ability to get future funding, the ability to get students and researchers, the ability to travel/present. Academic researchers need all of these things, along with facilities. If you mean industrial researchers, they need a government or private lab to do their thing. As the US just whacked a number of such labs and related funding, people are a bit more mobile than previously. It might also help that Canada's "just a short hop" away from the US. For either of these groups, "compensation" is (far?) more than just cash.