Front Burner - Canadian Tech’s rightward drift

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Following years of disillusionment with the federal Liberal party, some of Canada’s most high profile tech CEOs are leading a movement to bring their industry in line with the Conservative Party of Canada. According to new reporting, a collection of Canada’s tech CEOs have been discussing plans to influence Canada’s future in a WhatsApp group called ‘Build Canada’. Canada’s tech sector was once closely bound to the Liberals and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but many feel slighted by a government they feel failed to take their concerns seriously.Catherine McIntyre is a reporter with The Logic, and joins us to discuss Canadian Tech’s rightward drift, whether it is a product of similar trends in the United States, and the implications for Canada’s future.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In Scarborough, there's this fire behind our eyes. A passion in our bellies. It's in the hearts of our neighbors. The eyes of our nurses. And the hands of our doctors. It's what makes Scarborough, Scarborough. In our hospitals, we do more than anyone thought possible. We've less than anyone could imagine.

But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hey everybody, I'm Jamie Poisson. The image of American tech titans front and center at Donald Trump's inauguration, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Elon, it's hard for me to get out of my head. Mostly because it's so in-your-face captures the rightward shift in politics and culture that's happened in recent years.

Here at home, Canadian tech leaders have also been making this move to the right. And some of them have been part of a project to develop a roadmap for their vision of this country. Today on the show, I wanna talk about the similarities and differences between what's happening here and in the US and why some of Canada's most powerful millionaires and billionaires say they feel betrayed by the liberals

and excited about Pierre Polyev and the conservatives. Catherine McIntyre is a reporter with The Logic. She recently published this great piece that dives into all of this and more. Catherine, hey, it's great to have you on the show. Hi, Jamie. Great to be here. So let's start where you begin your reporting with this WhatsApp group titled Build Canada

that you have reported includes some of this country's most high profile leaders in the technology sector. I know that shortly after your story was published, they turned the group into like a website, but can you talk to me about who is in that original group and the kinds of things that they were discussing in it? Yeah, so my colleagues and I learned last month about this group of tech entrepreneurs that was essentially drumming up policy ideas meant to influence the next federal government. So folks kind of, you know, brainstorming these ideas were people like Shopify CEO Toby Luque and some of his fellow Shopify executives. There was John Ruffalo, a prominent

Canadian tech investor. We have a government that's not at work. We're doing a sideshow while we have the most significant risk to the Canadian economy that I've seen in my entire career. Yeah, dozens of other entrepreneurs and investors. And just tell me more about, you know, what their vision was for the country and now this website, like what's the purpose of this website? Yeah, so we were told initially before this website had launched that they were effectively coming up with ways to make Canada a better place, which is very vague. But given the members of the group, it's not surprising that they're really

focused on creating a more business-friendly environment in Canada. But they're also discussing things like immigration and transportation and healthcare, kind of a range of topics. And beyond just kind of thinking of discussing ways to improve the country and all these different kind of industries in Canada, they were really trying to find a way to create policies and get them implemented ultimately. I know that they have said or some of them have said that this Build Canada project is nonpartisan. But do you think that that's like an honest framing of it? I mean, it is nonpartisan in the sense that anyone, any political party, any lawmaker can look at this website and pull ideas from it. But you know, we know that some of the folks leading this initiative,

like Toby Lukey, for example, they've been extremely vocal in the last few months about their support for the conservatives and the conservative leader, Pierre Poliev, and also their kind of growing disdain for the liberals. Tell me more about that because I can't help but wonder exactly what changed for many of these people. Is it fair for me to say that many of them had pretty long standing in public affiliations with the federal Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau personally?

Anyone out there who ever said snowboarders can't amount to anything. Toby and I get to be the counter example on that. Toby, for example, but a bunch of them, right? Yeah, yeah, that's totally fair. If you go back a decade to when the Liberal government was first elected, Canada's tech community was really hopeful. They were really excited about this new leadership. The government was talking a lot about innovation at the time. They were saying things like the future success of all Canadians depended on it. They were setting aside lots of money to boost innovation and support venture capital and investing in the country.

Kind of the one big thing or one of the big things that the government did that really encouraged these tech sector leaders was set up these economic strategy tables, which were led by business and tech folks that were essentially meant to produce policy ideas for the liberal government on a range of industries in Canada. So there was, yeah, really this sense early on of an allyship and a collaboration between the liberals and the tax sector. Take me through what I think is kind of a slow undoing of that allyship. What happened? Yeah, absolutely. Like if you talk to folks now, they'll say this undoing happened over several years. It kind of feels like it happened all at once recently, but they say, no, there's

kind of a, like you said, slow undo doing here. One thing that the sector was annoyed with was they say the government didn't really listen to any of the recommendations, which they felt was a missed opportunity and also just kind of a slap in the face. You know, they spent all this time and effort to advise the government and just kind of went nowhere. And they also say that policies and programs that the liberals did announce, most of them came up short or just haven't even gotten off the ground. I just want to pick up on something you said there about, you know, this feeling of being ignored, right? Like in your piece, the Canadian investor John Ruffalo and Armin Bakurtzian, the CEO of a Kitchener-based medical device company, and the president of the Council of Canadian

Innovators, Benjamin Bergen, they all sort of expressed these feelings of betrayal by the liberals. Bakurtzian in particular talked about feeling like their contributions were shelved and that the liberals' policies failed. Is it the case that a lot of these guys feel personally affronted by Trudeau and the liberals? Yeah, that was a sentiment I heard a lot. And I think kind of the clearest example of this was with the capital gains tax increase announcement that the liberals made in the April budget. If you'll recall that this was a proposed change on the capital gains inclusion rate. It's now been paused, but essentially, it would increase the

amount of tax that people would pay on the profits from an asset sale. And this would mainly affect Canada's wealthiest people and business people, entrepreneurs, investors, they absolutely hated this idea. And they frankly found it personally insulting. And they pointed to this as the thing that proved in their minds that the liberals were no longer on their side. They said that, you know, increasing this tax was an attack on business and innovation. Almost more of a symbolic attack on business and innovation than a real one. And that, they said, was kind of the nail in the coffin. In Scarborough, there's this fire behind our eyes. A passion in our bellies.

It's in the hearts of our neighbors. The eyes of our nurses. And the hands of our doctors. It's what makes Scarborough, Scarborough. In our hospitals, we do more than anyone thought possible. We've less than anyone could imagine. But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together,

we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. What does a mummified Egyptian child, the Parthenon marbles of Greece, and an Irish giant all have in common? They are all stuff the British stole. Maybe. Join me, Mark Fennell, as I travel around the globe uncovering the shocking stories of how some, let's call them ill-gotten, artifacts made it to faraway institutions. Spoiler, it was probably the British. Don't miss a brand new season

of Stuff the British Style. Watch it free on CBC Gem. Catherine, we have talked on this show a lot about this cultural shift to the right that you can feel across public life and about the growing relationship between many of America's richest men and the White House. The US hasS. has also, you know, as I mentioned, seen a number of high profile billionaires go from historically supporting the Democrats to now publicly backing Trump, Elon. I think we need a change of administration. I think probably the Democratic Party was the party of meritocracy and of personal freedom. They used to be the free speech party. And

these days they seem to be the censorship party under the guise of hate speech. So weirdly, in my view, the Republican party is actually the party of, that's the meritocracy party. Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, who run a venture capital firm together, the American hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. Twenty things that Kamala Harris has said in the past, it's all anathema to business, to business and to free markets and to the filibuster

and to the rule of law and to the border. And they're all afraid to even say, well, she didn't mean any of it. Joe, you're preaching the converted. I know. These are billionaires who had been public backers and donors to the Democrats, simply switching sides, right?

And would you say that what we're seeing here is a similar political realignment, or do you have a sense of something different is happening here? It's like a different context. No, I do think there's similarities between that shift in the US and the shift here in Canada. Even if you look at donation records, like you said, there were a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, a lot of business and tech leaders that had previously

supported and donated to Biden and Hillary Clinton previously that threw their support and their dollars behind Trump in his last presidential campaign. And we see parallels here too where donors, liberal donors, are now supporting Poliev and hosting fundraisers for Poliev and the Conservative Party, which are being very well attended by other tech entrepreneurs and business leaders as well. So yeah, I do think it's fair to say there are some similarities. Can you tell me a little bit more about these fundraisers? Yeah, I mean, so one fundraiser I spoke to sources about was,

it happened shortly after the capital gains fiasco at a point where a lot of tech leaders and entrepreneurs, investors, they had kind of made up their mind that they were done with the liberal party, but they were still a little on the fence about where they would go next and whether Pierre Pelliet and the conservatives was the right party for them. These, I'm told, have been very effective in kind of changing the minds of folks who were on the fence a few months ago. Beyond fundraisers, though, we're also seeing the conservatives reach out directly to tech entrepreneurs, you know, visiting their, their offices, um, in, you know, there've been a couple of visits to Waterloo startups, um, which is, you know, a hotbed of, of innovation

and entrepreneurship in Canada, which, you know, that's really resonating with people. Um, my sources are saying, you know, it's, it's showing kind of like the liberals had showed 10 years ago, that they're listening, they're receptive of their ideas, and that they want to work together. We've talked about this kind of blurring of lines between private and public power in the US, you have private citizens worth hundreds of billions of dollars overseeing quasi-government departments that are, well, it seems, not subject to congressional oversight. Is this something that Canadians should be worried about at home when they hear that

there are groups of Canadian millionaires and billionaires mapping out a future for this country? Or, again, do you think that something different is happening here? Do you think that that's like a fair question to ask? I think it's a good question to ask. I mean, at this point, it seems inconceivable to me that we would see the kind of government takeover by tech billionaires that is effectively happening in the States. And I think part of the reason is Canada doesn't have anyone with the same concentration of wealth and power that an Elon Musk has. But what's happening now in Washington, that level of influence by private sector billionaires, calling the shots on things like things that will directly benefit them.

That was, that's unprecedented there too. I don't think people predicted that would happen. The other thing I wanted to ask you about was, you know, what extent have any of these Canadian tech giants also been really supportive of Trump himself, right? I'm thinking about Shopify CEO, Toby Lah, who we've been talking about. So after Trump announced the blanket tariffs on Canada, he tweeted essentially against Canada fighting back with counter tariffs. And he's been supportive of Trump's arguments that we haven't been done enough on the border or done enough to like internally fight gangs and fentanyl. A lot of people see Trump's arguments on that as sort of a red herring, but what kind of reaction has Toby gotten for remarks like that? And are we seeing other leaders in this field, you know, sort of come out in supportive or quasi supportive ways

for Trump? Yeah, I think Toby is definitely the most vocal and open about his, I don't know if you want to call it support or at least sympathy for Trump's position, various positions on things like the tariffs and his rationale for the proposed tariffs. tariffs. Beyond, you know, being kind of, as you said, quasi supportive of Trump, there is blatant, very enthusiastic support for Elon Musk from many of Canada's tech leaders, many of the folks in this Build Canada initiative. So you know, indirectly supporting supporting Trump initiative. So, you know, indirectly supporting supporting

Trump through Elon Musk. You know, if you go on any one of these guys' Twitter feeds, they're you know, they're full of praise for for Musk and his ideas and what he's doing in Washington. We've also seen from a lot of these tech guys or powerful business guys in the US a cultural shift to the right. So Elon Musk, of course, posts in opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion and trans issues. He rails against wokeness.

The Democrats are also promoting DEI, which is really just another form of racism and sexism. The reason it's called dead naming is because your son is dead. So my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus. All right, so let's. So I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that. But also Bill Ackman, who we mentioned earlier, he kind of led the charge on the campaign to fire former president of Harvard University,

Claudine Gay. Harvard president Claudine Gay has announced she is resigning from office. Dr. Gay has been facing increasing criticism over her response to anti-Semitism on campus. And this is not just a Harvard problem. And it's an NYU problem. It's a University of Pennsylvania problem. Uh, it, you know, the more I examine the issue, the more woke, the more left-leaning the institution, the more anti-Semitism, which is a very unfortunate thing.

You know, you have talked about how this Build Canada project was really about policies around innovation and business, but do we have a sense of how much any of these guys are animated by other interests, like the culture works? Yeah, yeah, I think it does go beyond just business and innovation policy in some respects. And for some people, I wouldn't say all of the Build Canada members would feel this way,

but again, if we're talking about the most vocal ones, they have said that they are inspired by kind of the vibe shift in the states. Some of the sources I spoke to for this story said so to me explicitly in this cultural movement away from wokeness, kind of like a rejection of political correctness and, you know, as he said, things like diversity and inclusion. I think they are, by throwing their support behind the conservatives, they're latching onto a party in Canada that I think would be more receptive of these ideas than the liberals would be. I know Toby from Shopify and Shopify keeps coming up a lot, but I'm thinking of a tweet that I saw him send recently where he was critical of so-called wokeness, so has his COO Kaz Najation being as well. He's

tweeted like in particular about how John A. MacDonald was maligned by quote the woke media and about the need to fight what he refers to as like woke revisionism. Right. And speaking of Najatia, it might be worth noting here that tax records from 2023 show that he is one of the directors of the True North Center for Public Policy, which is the parent group for the True North, which is a right wing online media site based here in Canada. Just sticking with Shopify for just a little bit longer, Catherine, for a brief period this week, Kanye West's Yeezy website, which is powered by Shopify, was selling a single item, a white t-shirt emblazoned with a black swastika. There was a lot of outrage about that. Shopify was hosting it and then did eventually take it down.

Did they take it down because it was Nazi merchandise? What happened there? Yeah, no, the short answer is they did not take it down because it's Nazi merchandise, despite having a lot of pressure to do so, including from, of their former executives at Shopify and employees who felt very opposed to this kind of thing, the company supporting this kind of thing effectively. They ended up removing it not because of any principled stance against hate speech or anti-Semitism. They removed it because they said it was a stunt, that's a quote, and quote, not a good faith attempt to make money. And then therefore it was a fraud risk. Why don't you pull it sooner?

Look, good process creates good outcomes, Sarah, and we follow a good process here. It was down, the moment we realized this was not actually a real commerce practice, they weren't actually engaging in authentic commerce, we pulled it down. So yeah, it's, it's, Toby has had, he's taken this kind of free speech absolutist stance for a while. And, you know, I think when faced with pressure to remove this for in particular, the the fraud risk rationale is actually kind of a clever way to deal with the backlash without alienating the kind of like far right, free speech absolutist that that you know, he's he's identified with. absolutist that he's identified with. Can you just tell me a little bit more, when you say that he's had to deal with this for a while, this isn't the first time something like this

has come up, right? I remember in the fall, they were criticized for hosting a store associated with a brand called The Official 1984, which included content praising Adolf Hitler, as well as Holocaust denial. And then there was also widespread criticism around Shopify's decision to host the Breitbart store.

Breitbart News is an extreme right-wing U.S. media organization. And just talk to me a bit more about Toby's rationale around that stuff and how Shopify has dealt with this in the past. JANELLE Yeah, so he has kind of always taken this position that Shopify cannot impose its morality on merchants and that it will, you know, it'll allow anything that isn't considered illegal in the market where it's being sold on shops that are backed by its

technology. He said that if he or the company started making decisions about what merchants can and cannot sell their products, it becomes hard to know where that line ends. [♪ Music playing in background. Just if we could come back to this Build Canada project here, created by some of the country's richest people. You know, I don't want to get so far down the rabbit hole of specifics here, but when we look at some of the stuff that they're proposing, I wonder if you could just give me one or two specific examples of what it is that they

want to see happen. Yeah, so I mean, a lot of the stuff they're talking about here isn't super shocking. And many of these ideas have been discussed for years. One of them is, you know, a health tech entrepreneur suggesting digitizing health records to make them more accessible for patients and doctors, right? That's kind of a popular suggestion that just has never really gotten implemented. Then another entrepreneur suggests improving the country's immigration system to prioritize newcomers that will contribute most to the economy. Someone else has suggested reducing

inter-fervintial trade barriers. Very hot topic right now. So you know these aren't like groundbreaking suggestions they do go into some detail about how they think these policies could actually get off the ground. But I think it's important to note that a lot of the the entrepreneurs that are suggesting these policies they stand to gain personally from them, which isn't to say that they are bad for the rest of the country, but it's just, I think, you know, there's a clear element of self-interest here to keep in mind. We talked earlier about how a lot of these guys are moving towards the Conservative Party, and that the Conservative Party has been doing quite a

bit of outreach with them. One thing I am trying to figure out is how much of this here is them just kind of putting their finger in the air and trying to figure out which way the political winds are blowing, right? Right now, polling is indicating that since Trudeau stepped down and Mark Carney emerged, that things have really tightened up, right? And that the federal liberals have picked up some momentum. The conservatives are still ahead. But do you think that there's a world

in which these tech millionaires, billionaires here in Canada could be brought back to the Liberal Party coalition under someone like Mark Carney? Or is this essentially a lost cause at this point? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. If I am to take these people at their word, they want a change in government and no liberal candidate will satisfy them at this point. They view, you know, Christopher Uland and Mark Carney, kind of the two front runners in the liberal leadership race as liberal insiders who would not be drastically different from a Trudeau government. a true doubt government. But as you said, the polls have been narrowing, and if these people want influence to power and policy, they'll want whoever's in government to

listen to them. And I think they view the liberals as being less receptive to their ideas, you know, certainly around things like smaller government and lower taxes than a conservative government would be. But yeah, I mean, it would be in their interest to, again, try to work with the liberals if they end up winning the next election, if influence and power, as I said, is their goal here. Okay. Catherine, this is great. Thank you so much for coming by.

Thanks, Jamie. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.