As of Canadian Universities. UBC in particular.

Anecdotical evidence, but still.

Friend of mine, owner of small factory here in Vancouver, asked me once to assemble him software department specifically from Eastern Europe people. On question "why?" he answered - they are engineers first and programmers only second, and UBC makes CS people.

I hope your friend realizes that this is clear-cut racial/ethnicity-based discrimination.

It's a violation of the Canadian Human Rights Act, see: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/rights-w...

I suppose if you try to do it at scale though there are other mechanisms for calling you out on deliberately circumventing the spirit of the law.

That is absolutely orthogonal to business requirements to be honest.

Especially when you need to establish production of anything as primitive as N95s.

Of course you can send airplanes all around the world for them (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-at-least-tw...) but when they will return empty, that thin reasoning layer will vaporize almost immediately.