Though, the good old USA still remains the first choice of students seeking higher education abroad I think Canada is going to catch up fast. Largely due to the fact that they have now relaxed their terms of employment once your post grad education is complete. You can now get up to 3 years in work permit in any field (even different from what you have studied).

This however is not the case in the USA, you are only allowed 1 year of practical training in the field of your studies. You can avail this privilege only once, maybe it be after your grad or masters. This is where students going to Canada will have a edge. One year is not much time to work with an organization specially if you are looking to be hired full time after you are done with the practical training, companies are much more likely to hire someone who has worked with them for more than a year before they take the pain of processing all the paperwork for the individual and spending a couple thousand dollars on him / her.

All said and done, USA still has a major advantage over Canada, that is their sheer size. The job market in US is much bigger than that of Canada and when I was a student doing my under grad in Chicago, there were a lot of people from Canada who were studying with me, many of them had given up their permanent resident status in Canada to come and study in US because there we very limited job opportunities in Canada.

Excerpt from HT.

Under the new scheme, announced by the Canadian government Thursday, foreign students going to Canada will now be able to get an open work permit under a post-graduate programme, with virtually no restrictions on the type of employment and no requirement of a job offer.

Previously, international students were allowed to work for one or two years, depending on location.

The duration of the work permit has been increased to three years to ensure easier employment opportunities to target foreign students in an increasingly competitive global education market.

“The government of Canada wants more foreign students to choose Canada,” Canada’s Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley said in a statement, released by the Canadian High Commission here.