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Most people change their entire relationship with a room the moment they sense a door is closing behind them, a dynamic that policymakers would do well to understand.

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With that in mind, former Google LLC chief financial officer Patrick Pichette offered a bewildering solution to Canada’s brain-drain problem.

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“You want to go to the U.S.? Give me back my money,” he said at the Liberal Party convention in Montreal this past weekend, arguing that graduates educated at Canadian post-secondary institutions should repay his wild estimate of $500,000 in partially taxpayer-subsidized education they received.

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He also called for shutting down the TN visa program to keep Canadian graduates at home, apparently unaware or unconcerned that the TN is an American program under the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement that Canada has no authority to cancel, though the agreement will be up for review. He claimed the cost of obtaining a TN is a mere $30, conveniently ignoring the significant legal fees many applicants directly or indirectly incur.

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Pichette spent years working in the U.S. and he appears to currently live in the United Kingdom. Draw your own conclusions on those small biographical details.

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The growing number of successful Canadians who are leaving Canada or exploring the idea is not a theoretical trend and the capital attached to those departures is measured in the tens of billions of dollars. Proposals such as Pichette’s don’t solve the talent and capital exodus; they concede it.

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The instinct to make people pay if they won’t stay has appeared before. In 2023, Australia consulted on changes to its tax residency rules that would have made it easier to enter the system and considerably harder to leave. Critics called it “adhesive residency” and that’s apropos. Canada would do well to learn from that near-miss rather than adopt the experiment.

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Many incorrectly assume those who leave Canada do so without financial cost. However, paragraph 128.1(4)(b) of the Income Tax Act deems individuals who cease to be Canadian residents to have disposed of their worldwide assets at fair market value.

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There are important exceptions. For example, personally owned Canadian real estate and registered assets such as registered retirement savings plans are excluded from the deemed disposition because Canada will ultimately tax those assets when they are sold, withdrawn or considered disposed of.

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For most other assets, however, any accrued gains are immediately taxed. Such a rule can be troublesome for people who hold illiquid assets — like private company interests — and possible long-term double taxation needs to be properly planned. Given such rules, Canada already aggressively participates in the success of those who leave.

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Some also think successful Canadians have a moral duty to Canada for all that the country provided them. But framing departures as a moral failure gets the causality exactly backwards. Entrepreneurs don’t leave because they stopped caring about Canada; they leave because it stopped making it worthwhile to stay.