No. There's a US media narrative that taxes and health care are worse in Canada than the US but:
1) You will likely pay more in taxes in California than Canada.
2) It's easier to itemize self-employment tax expenses in Canada, so you can easily pay half the taxes of the US. (I paid 12% of total income the last year I worked in Toronto.)
3) Everybody I know in Canada is happy with health care, and infinitely happier than Americans who've received false bills.
4) Startups have a big advantage in Canada because of the state health care, and unrelated lower salary expectations.
However, salaries are lower in Canada because companies pay less (like Europe or anywhere outside the US), but that's not related to taxes or health care.
This is a personal conclusion having work in both, some US and some Canadian based companies. What I realized, the reason we are pay less in Canada, is caused by our perceived value from management.
In the American company, the managers want me to succeed because that is directly link to their success. I'm part of the team, I'm accountable, but I had more freedom.
In the Canadian one, managers want all the credit (pay+bonuses+recognition), because they are the incredible one who made the monkey produce the value. I'm part of a pool, managers will decide what programming language I'll program in, he's managing the risk after all. Oh, and by the way, it was a hard year, not all goals where reached, so they need to cap the bonuses, but the company is glad for the all-time profit record.
Of course, it’s a bit of a caricature. It surely applies to US or Canadian company. But our perceived value struck me in all my employers.
This appears to be a general problem in politics (both corporate and governmental). The person in charge is surrounded by experts (in a specific subject) but he doesn't listen to them.
Yes, sometimes those experts are wrong or their ideas are not compatible with the general direction of the company and that's where you really want a leader's judgement but the solution to this problem isn't to ignore the expert, it's to find a compromise, verify information by asking multiple experts with differing opinions, make the experts understand the goals of the company.
In theory being a manager is the easiest job in the world. You delegate all your competence away to people who are better than you at the skill you are delegating. So the only challenge is to utilize the value of that competence properly.
One thing folks don't account for is that the Canadian tax bill includes healthcare, which is something US employers pay $600 per month for. It's effectively a private tax. Comparing like-for-like, one should really include the health premiums paid by employers in the tax total when comparing to Canada.
Even with that in mind, in a number of recent years, the median Canadian tax bill has been lower than the median American tax bill [1]. And to your point, it varies by state/province. The most expensive state OR province for high-income folks is California (51.9%) and the lowest is Alberta (39%). [1]
