Al Vigier: We threw the party. Someone else gets the next dance. On the walk home I couldn’t stop thinking that this is a very Vancouver story — not only about soccer.
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A week ago I wrote in these pages about being in the crowd when Canada won its first men’s World Cup game, and how B.C. Place turned into something I had never heard.
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On Wednesday, I was back, in the same red sea, for Canada against Switzerland.
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This time we lost 2-1.
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And this time, somehow, we still made history. Canada finished second in its group and reached the Cup knockout round for the first time. A substitute, Promise David, came on and scored to make it 2-1, and for a few wild minutes the whole stadium believed we were about to draw level. We didn’t.
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The crowd was just as loud, just as kind, just as gloriously Canadian. Strangers with their arms around each other. Drums. Flares. Flags the size of bedsheets. For one more afternoon this city felt like the centre of the world.
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Here is the bit that quietly hurt. A draw would have kept Canada in Vancouver for the next round. The loss sends the team to Los Angeles on Sunday instead. We threw the party. Someone else gets the next dance.
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On the walk home I couldn’t stop thinking that this is a very Vancouver story, and not only about soccer.
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We’re brilliant at building something special here and then watching it leave. Our smartest people take the offer from California. Our best companies get bought and move south. We even helped invent the science behind the AI now reshaping the world, and watched the trillion-dollar payoff land somewhere else.
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This is measurable. A recent study found that barely a third of Canada’s most promising startups now keep their headquarters here, down from more than two-thirds a decade ago. Most of the rest go to the U.S. We raise them, then wave them goodbye. These aren’t small companies. They’re the ones most likely to become the next big employer, the next anchor tenant, the next reason a young engineer stays in B.C.
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I run an AI company in Vancouver, so I think about this more than most. The good news is that for once there is real money on the table to keep this stuff at home. The only question is whether we’re ambitious enough to hold on to what we build or whether we keep shipping it away and cheering from a distance.
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I have lived that pull. I have watched good people take the California offer, and I have had the quiet conversations every Canadian tech founder knows, the ones that begin with a U.S. investor and end with a gentle suggestion that we incorporate in Delaware and move the team south. Each time that happens, a little more of what we built here goes with it: the headquarters, the patents, the hiring, the wealth, all of it landing somewhere warmer for capital and colder for loyalty. We keep the origin story. Someone else keeps the company.
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Team Canada showed us the upside of doing things at home. It filled our stadium, on our terms, and gave the whole country a day it will never forget. The loss stung precisely because we wanted to keep them here.
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So, on Sunday, I will do what the rest of the country will do. I will put on red, find a screen and yell at it like the team can hear me. Allez les Rouges. Bring it home, even from the road.
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Al Vigier is founder and CEO of Caseway, a Vancouver-based sovereign Canadian AI company. He has published more than 150 op-eds on law, technology and public policy.
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