Maybe I'm looking at this from a different perspective, but I just find it hard to believe that Canada does not have a high level of technology, maybe not as high or diverse as say the US, but it should have reached some level of it.
I am a microelectronics engineer (NOT an IT in any way, shape or form), my job specializes in designing integrated circuits that goes to practically any modern electronic device you can find, from TV remote controls, to smartphones, to supercomputers, to missile guidance systems and everything in-between. That said, these items are typically what's being heralded as "high-tech", whether its the latest AI, fast cellphone CPU/GPUs, 5G networking, all of those stuff. It won't be possible without actually having a chip doing all of that.
Before I decided applying to Canada, I did a research on the general labor market and compared it with other nations, since well it's pointless to immigrate to a country and end up not doing anything there. At that time, the results were that Canada has the 4th largest job opportunity in this category after US, Japan and UK among first world nations. In addition, if you include non-first world nations then Canada will be 6th after US, Japan, India, China, and UK. Individual countries in the EU has a slightly smaller size which counts them as lower than Canada's, but of course, if you count the EU market as a whole, then it's way way larger than what Canada has.
Just for comparison, in Australia the demand for this kind of job was abysmal about 70% LESS than what Canada has, and in New Zealand it's practically non-existent. By the way, I'm only talking here about is chip design, for chip manufacturing, countries like Taiwan, Norway, Indonesia, Malaysia would be in the forefront.
What I'm saying here is that if you were a microelectronics engineer, which is a very niche, less talked, but definitely high-tech line of work, relative to the popular "tech" industries like software engineering, IT, etc. and you look at the global labor market; you can see Canada will stand out as an opportunity, and the companies hiring in Canada aren't just startups, most of the them are coming from AMD, Qualcomm, Synopsys, you might not know the latter, but these are companies working at the very edge of IC technology. And this is the reason, why I just find it hard to believe when people point out Canada doesn't have a STEM industry, when they are essentially within top 10 in the list of having the most jobs in one of the most high-tech industries in the planet. Not diversified, yes, maybe, can't comment on that since I don't know how other the categories work out, but non-existent, that's a strong word.