In Vancouver you can easily score awesome developers for 80K/year (160K in the valley) Through SR&ED you can get up to 40% of this back (so you're down to 50K / engineer (*note that I've not personally used SR&ED but I know others who have successfully). And finally, benefits packages are in the low thousands / year instead of tens of thousands. All told, you can build a team of awesome engineers for 1/2~1/3 the price of what it'd cost in the valley.