In Canada, yes, in America no. They get paid more than the ones in Canada. However many people here seem to not understand things like conversion rates or how in the United States you have States that pay different amounts, Georgia for instance on average pays $55k USD a year, or $76.3k CAD. It's rather shocking what a little bit of research can do or simple math, but fuck that I guess. It's better to look just as stupid as David.
As someone with several relatives who are teachers in Canada there's something you quickly learn: substitute teachers massively drag down the average wage for teachers, So when you are discussing how much money there's in teaching, you need to contrast substitutes to full-time teachers. Substitute teachers are severely underpaid, make up the vast majority of our teachers, and most of them need second or third jobs just to meet the cost of living. A teacher who has a full-time position though and only a handful of years under their belt makes amazing money with amazing wages, even accounting for cost of living of where they would need to be to have those jobs. So it's better to say that our substitute teachers are underpaid and not our teachers. When you draw this distinction a lot of the misunderstanding that happens over this debate every time it happens starts to become a lot easier to work out.
As you pointed out about the fact that different states pay different amounts, the same is true in Canada. So unless you're a troglodyte, you should not be comparing the wages of teachers in Canada to the wages of teachers in the US. You should be comparing the wages of teachers in a particular province or state to the wages of teachers in a different particular province and state. Neither country is standardized to the degree where these arguments actually function as a whole, but we can make some general claims due to certain economic pressures and political structure changes.
It absolutely also depends on what province you are in for how good the pay is, but I have had relatives who have been teachers in Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec. This pattern has been maintained in each of these places that full-time teachers are paid well and substitutes are paid like shit. If you move into Saskatchewan and Manitoba as well as I believe Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, which are all provinces with significantly smaller populations and money to go around, they tend to pay their teacher's far worse though depending on where you live the cost of living can be lower so it can work out better.
Chances are that once you are no longer a substitute, you are doing very well as a teacher in Canada. Teaching is one of the only single income careers right now in Canada that can lead to home ownership with our out of control property prices, even when you live in some of the most expensive highest cost of living locations, but if you are stuck into hell of being a substitute you probably can't even afford a cardboard box and welfare food. Part of that is in over saturation of substitute teachers and very little need for as many full-time teachers due to a lower population. These issues are only made worse because a huge wave of millennials and older Zoomers became teachers because they were told to chase their dreams and a lot of them dreamed about working with children. They were also told that anything you get from college would pay off and it is biting thousands of them in the ass in both countries because we have a lot of higher education careers absolutely flooded with more people than they need.
I also know people who moved to the US to make better money as teachers. You need to go shopping between not just states, but also municipalities to be taking home more money as a teacher in the US than Canada if you are already out of the hell that is being a substitute. If you aren't out of that hell you don't need to be as picky, but you still might actually find it harder in the US to take home more money there than you were making as a substitute teacher. This is even after the exchange rate. The big factor that makes this such a nuanced issue is needing to adjust for cost of living. That's something you left out when trying to be a smart-ass about exchange rates and "basic research". If you want to point at such a thing that's perfectly fine and I agree with you for doing so, just don't leave out the other half of the equation because your income isn't really what's on your paycheque, it's what you have after you've paid off your living expenses. Don't leave that detail out because otherwise you open yourself up to obvious attacks for neglecting to address cost of living. Depending on where you are in the US or Canada cost of living can be wildly different not just at the cost per state/province, but the cost per municipality. This can mean that while your paycheque is larger, you are effectively taking home less money each month after you account for your basic necessities. Only a nigger wouldn't account for cost of living when determining their income. Cost of living is the difference between two people on the exact same wage having completely different qualities of life and having completely different amounts of disposable income to enjoy the fruits of their labour with. It isn't just about working hard and getting solid wages, it is also about being smart enough to live in a place where those wages actually mean something.
This is an issue I know a good number of people who moved from Canada to the US ran into as teachers after hearing about the promised land to the South, they found amazing wages, but then needed to pick up a night job at fucking McDonald's due to cost of living. When you are moving for work you can't just look at how well your new job is going to pay, but also how expensive where you are moving to will be once you are there.
To look at another industry: this is a common trap that a lot of people in the tech industry fall for when they moved to California. In fact, I know a fair few tech companies who are doing large layoffs right now are actually looking at offering not that much lower wages for the exact same positions done remotely while mostly shopping them in places with lower cost of living as effectively those people would be making more money than the ones that used to do the same jobs in California due to that lower cost of living making them way more attractive jobs.
Regardless, these do combine to create the result that is in the US teachers are typically underpaid far more than in Canada because the majority of teachers are not able to get the higher wages in the places that they need that higher pay to meet a higher cost of living, which is to say cities. Most people who are running South for work often end up in places with a much higher cost of living and therefore how far that amount of money goes is significantly reduced leading to a poorer lifestyle due to a lower effective income.
The net result of this is that best paying teaching jobs in the US are far better than Canada, even after accounting for cost of living as well as exchange rate, and there are more full-time teaching jobs. However, the average full-time teaching job effectively pays less after both of these things are accounted for in the US versus Canada. However, Canada is stuck with a lot of severely underpaid substitute teachers due to there not being in a full-time jobs for them. So for substitute teachers or for Canadians who live in areas with absurdly high costs of living and where the teachers aren't paid as well, they are better off moving to either other parts of their own country or to the US. They should not be making these decisions based on country alone though, but the cost of living of the particular municipality that they're moving to as well as the wages in the part of whichever country they chose.
This is a really fucking messy issue that we shouldn't go into further in this thread because it would require researching not just every single state and what they pay the teachers but every single municipality and the rate at which you get pay increases for working in the field longer changes based on where you are and then doing the exact same thing across Canada and is just derailing the thread. Let's all just get our last word in and then laugh at the fucking turkey.
