Tech Won't Save Us - Canada’s Tech Leaders Want Their Own DOGE w/ Jen St. Denis

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Jen St. Denis to discuss how Silicon Valley thinking is creeping into Canadian politics as Donald Trump continues to threaten the country with tariffs and annexation. Jen St. Denis is a reporter with The Tyee.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:Jen wrote about the Canadian tech leaders who want their own DOGE and a BC-based Twitter/X account pushing white supremacism.Paris wrote about the effort to expand DOGE beyond US borders and the conservative-tech alliance in Canada.A recent poll found 51% of Canadians now see the United States as an enemy or potential threat.Support the show

I think that the main people that have been kind of at the forefront of an effort to kind of combine tech and politics, you have to look at the company Shopify. Hello and welcome to TechMontsab a bus made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Jen St. Denis. Jen is a reporter with the Ta'i, a local publication based in British Columbia, Canada. For the past few months, we've been talking a lot about changes happening in the United States, the alliance between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump, and the complete remaking of the American government that we're seeing in front of our eyes, often to benefit the tech industry and

some of the most powerful people in the world who run not only that industry, but increasingly the United States itself. But that also has consequences beyond the borders of the United States. And those ideas are not just kind of trapped within that one country, but are increasingly influencing powerful people in other parts of the world as well, who see the opportunity to use what is happening in the United States to try to push for a similar program in their own countries that would benefit them as well. And so you are probably aware, because I'm sure I've talked about it on this show as well as in other places, plus, you know, the media coverage that you've been seeing, that Donald Trump and the United States have really placed a focus on Canada in particular as a target for

their wrath, their ire, rather than a partnership, an ally, something like that. Canada has been hit with major tariffs, and Donald Trump keeps talking about turning it into the 51st state. But within Canada, there are also changes happening as well. Longtime Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently stepped aside, and Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England, has stepped in to replace him, or rather has been chosen by the membership of the Liberal Party to take over the party and as a result, become the prime minister. By the time you hear this, he may have announced an election. Canada is likely to go to an election very soon and is going to vote either at the end of April or in

early May to see who will form the next government, whether the Liberal Party will stay in power or whether the Conservatives will retake control of Canada after about 10 years of being on the sidelines and in opposition. But in the midst of all that, the tech industry in Canada is also organizing to try to get a particular program and a particular set of ideas adopted by whatever the next government is going to be. And they seem to really want their own version of Doge to be created in Canada. They have set up an organization called Build Canada, where they're pushing for specific policies. And some of them have also worked on a website called Canada Spends that is designed to draw attention to particular aspects of government

spending with the whole idea to say, you know, Canada needs a Doge, a Department of Government Efficiency in order to get rid of all of this inefficient spending within the government, right? To do this austerity program, to really start to gut the programs that the Canadian government has. And that is, of course, worrying for many reasons, not just when you look down at the United States and see what is happening there. So I wanted to have Jen on the show to get into all this, to talk about what is happening in Canada at the moment as it's about to go to an election, as it's facing these pressures from the United States, and as its own tech industry is organizing to try to do something similar to what the tech industry in the United States is doing, but also to get a picture of how this geopolitical moment is

changing things within Canada as well. And hopefully this will be the first of some other conversations with what this means in the first of some other conversations with what this means in other parts of the world too over the next few months. So I hope you enjoy this insight into what is happening in Canada, the push to create a doge here and why that would be an absolutely terrible idea. If you do enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep offering you these critical perspectives on

the tech industry and its wider impacts on the world, you can join supporters like Andrew, Shannon from Boston, Chris in San Francisco, Jessica from Seattle, James from Oxford, James Stiegel, Lima Bean from Pittsburgh, and Scott from Portland in Oregon by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Jen, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Oh, I'm so happy to be here, Paris. I'm really excited to have you. And you know, we're talking coast to coast today. You're on the West Coast, I'm on the East Coast. So this real kind of cross Canada moment occurring. Yeah, we've cut Toronto out of the equation. Totally. Totally. Which is totally fine.

You know, the show's producer is in Toronto. So our audio files will go there to be put together. This is kind of the first episode that I've done specifically speaking to a Canadian. Hopefully I'm remembering that properly since the change in the Trump administration and everything that is going on there, in particular, you know, his coming to office and the particular orientation that we've seen him have toward Canada with the talk of, you know, the 51st state and the tariffs that he's levying against Canada. So I just wanted to start by asking, before we get into the specific like tech focus of things, what have you made of what is going on now? And what have you seen as the response within Canada to this very changing relationship to the United States that has happened over the past few months? This first started right after Trump

was elected. And we did not expect this at all, that his attention would turn towards Canada. And that was a shock. And it sort of started to show up in Trudeau had to rush down to Mar-a-Lago to kind of head off this initial threat of tariffs that happened quite early on in the right after Trump was elected. Trump is making these truth social posts, calling Justin Trudeau governor and talking about Canada as a state. And we were all just kind of like, what? We didn't really know what to make of it. There was a weird meme of Trump like standing on some random mountains that were not Canadian mountains, like talking about how he was looking at Canada. It was just very odd. Yeah. It was like a weird AI generated image of Trump standing in the mountains with a Canadian flag next to him. And then people who like paid attention to the

mountains were like, I'm pretty sure the mountains are Swiss mountains. Because we know what our mountains look like. Yeah. Those aren't Canadian mountains. It was just bizarre. It was the thing that Trump always does where he's like, quote, joking, but he's not really joking. And so it's hard to know whether to take him seriously. It's hard to know if he's going to remain focused on that. And I remember that Justin Trudeau's former chief of staff, Gerald Butts, I think it was on Threads or something, I saw him make a comment like, oh, don't worry. Trump always makes these jokes. He made those jokes in the first administration. However, he kept on saying it kept on threatening Canadian sovereignty

in conjunction with threatening tariffs. And that started to get very apparent in January, he kept on saying and the sovereignty threat kept on going on. And so at that point, I was like, and a lot of other people observing were just like, well, he keeps on saying this. And he keeps on saying it over and over again in press conferences. And it just became too hard to ignore. What I think was really interesting is that we saw a really huge shift in Canadian politics. We had seen the Liberal Party, the reigning Liberal Party who'd been in power since 2015 with Justin Trudeau at the head as a prime minister. He had been deeply unpopular. The federal conservatives who are led by Pierre Polyev, they had been like very successful in attacking Trudeau, in attacking like policies

like the carbon tax. And Trudeau was just a deeply, deeply unpopular prime minister. And in fact, his own party had forced him out. That's how unpopular he was. And so he, at the beginning of the year, had announced in January, he announced he was going to resign. And then all of a sudden, the tone just really shifted for Canadian politics over the course of a bit. It was really fast, right? Paris, it was like, it was like a month where all of a sudden Trudeau was like making these speeches about, you know, Canadians standing strong against the US that were just like making everybody cry and like feel patriotic. And Pierre Pallievre was struggling. He was sticking to his message of like carbon tax,

carbon tax, wanting this to be the carbon tax election and wanting to go up against Justin Trudeau, who was no longer going to be running as prime minister. And Pierre Polyev was just caught really flat footed. And also Polyev, it has to be said, has been like echoing a lot of rhetoric from President Trump, even like his slogan that he's still sticking with,

Canada first is very similar to Trump's slogan, America first. But Polyev has really tried hard to like come out and be tough, but it just it hasn't really caught on with voters. And it's been really interesting to contrast Per Polyev with another conservative politician in Canada, Doug Ford, who's the premier of Ontario. Doug Ford is like a very like, populist leader. But there was a great like CBC story where he had been caught on a pop mic saying, oh, I was really happy when Trump got elected. But now he's stabbing us in the back. And that really encapsulated like the Doug Ford approach was just like out of the gate saying

Canada's not for sale being really strong going on American TV again and again saying like we're going to protect our sovereignty. These tariffs are bad for various reasons. Yeah, he even got his own version of the baseball cap with Canada is not for sale on it instead of make America great again. That's right. A potent visual political image. Totally. And Polyev has just really, really struggled to switch gears and to stop being this little like annoying, aggressive political figure that was at one time was very popular, but now is sort of being seen as too much. My partner is sort of talking about how the tone has shifted from some people that he works with that maybe like before there would have been grumblings about transgender rights stuff that

they've been obviously reading or seeing on Facebook. And then all of a sudden the tone has shifted now to just being like, no, like I'm buying Canadian. I think there's been a real tone shift away from some of those like far right political ideas that had really, really gotten into our culture because people are exposed to them like over and over and over again. And so that's been really, really interesting to watch. And it seems to have really unified the country in a very, yeah, very interesting way. I still see that ads on like YouTube that are being run by the conservatives, and they're still so focused on the carbon tax. And it's like, did you guys not get the memo that things have shifted, right?

That people's attention is somewhere else right now. And that is not the number one issue. But I think that part of it, as you're saying, is that it's a bit difficult for them to come out and be like the anti-Trump to present themselves in that way when there has been so much of a comparison between Pierre Polyev and Donald Trump and the kind of rhetoric that he has been using. And yeah, to see this very significant shift in Canadian public opinion, not just in like the topics that are preoccupying people, but also toward the relationship with the United States, where I think there was always a complicated relationship between Canada and America, right? In the sense that we're very close culturally,

there's a lot of social ties there. But also Canadians like to feel that they're kind of better than the Americans, right? Because we have the public health care and all those sorts of things. But despite that, like there was still this kind of like friendliness, right? You know, like Americans are a lot like us, you know, we know a lot of them were very integrated into their culture, all that sort of stuff. But then there was this polling like last week or the week before where a majority of Canadians now see the United States as an enemy or a threat. This is like a profound change in the way that this relationship works and the way that we perceive it. Yeah, I can't underline enough how much public opinions has shifted. Like in Canada, most of our population lives along the Canada-US border, especially here

in Vancouver, where I live, like people just run down to Bellingham, Washington to get milk. Like it's such a close relationship normally. We don't think anything of like going down to the States to vacation, going down there to cross-border shop. Tons of Canadians go and work in the States. Like it's supposed to be an extremely close relationship with a lot of trade going back and forth. Over the border, that has completely shifted. Like people are not going to the States for spring break. There's photos of like empty, like Pearson airport in Toronto, just the hall for like us customs is just like completely empty right now. Whereas like last year it was filled with people going down for spring break trips. So it's just been a really sudden and swift change.

And I think part of that too, though, Paris is like people are seeing the stuff that's happening in the States around what we're going to be talking about Elon Musk's stoke effort, the stuff about cracking down on immigration, these stories of like Canadians and British people and Germans like being held in ICE custody. And they're seeing this like really extreme kind of ideology also play out in the US. And I think that's part of it too, that it's like combined with the sovereignty threat and the real aggressiveness against Canada all of a sudden with just seeing like the extremity of some of the decisions being taken. That's a really good point. I know whenever, like I mentioned to my grandmother that I might have to

go to the States for work, she is immediately like nervous as to whether I'm going to be safe because things have changed and all this kind of stuff. So yeah, that is definitely like on people's minds, right? And I think that's a really good segue as well to talk about this broader issue that we're planning to discuss that you've been writing about that we've both been kind of watching evolve for a while here. And that is, of course, in the United States, we have seen this change in the tech industry and this relationship between the Trump administration and many powerful tech executives, obviously, Elon Musk, most prominently, but not solely him, you know, a lot of powerful and influential figures in the tech industry have aligned themselves with this extreme right wing politics and movement down there. Up here in Canada, we have also started to see stirrings

of similar sort of things, I guess, to start broadly, and then we can dig into the specifics. What is going on with Canada's tech elite right now? And how are we seeing kind of their views evolve as well? Yeah, so I think the first indication we saw this was this really good article in this business publication out of Toronto called The Logic. And they really did a deep dive into kind of how a lot of people, not just in tech, but kind of Canadian business people had shifted from supporting the Liberals. You know, when the Liberals got elected in tech, but kind of Canadian business people had shifted from supporting the Liberals, you know, when the Liberals got elected in 2015, they were like, we're cool, we're gonna be supporting tech, like that was one of the things that they were talking about. I think they had like a minister

for innovation and had these things called super clusters. And you know, they wanted to support tech. Well, 10 years later, I guess a lot of these executives are feeling a little like, or at least they're saying that, oh, that didn't move as fast as we wanted it to. It's kind of funny because we're going to be talking about government spending later, but this is talking about like the federal government supporting the tech industry with money. So just keep that in your head. But the thing that made them really irate was the liberals proposal to raise the capital gains tax. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. So something that these tech executives said, this is going to hurt entrepreneurs, this is going to hurt small businesses. Of course, it's like wealthy people who are going to have to pay more capital gains. And so that seemed to be

what kind of pushed them to go and consider supporting Pierre Polyev. And according to this story and the logic, a lot of them have been meeting with Polyev and really like what they're hearing from him. And so there's been this sort of political shift, just like we saw in the States, kind of a political shift to the right. You know, not really that surprising because the conservatives can definitely sell themselves to business people as like a pro-business party. So in some ways, it's not really that surprising. But I think you've laid it out really well. Right. And I think that those are the key things. Right. There was already this kind of pre-existing shift occurring. And I think part of that was because the Canadian government has not been as friendly with all the tech companies or tech in general for the past number of years,

as there has been this change in kind of the orientation that government has toward the tech industry. And of course, bringing in new regulations against certain tech companies, of course, those often targeted American tech companies, not so much what was happening in Canada, but still got the ire of some of these folks in tech who didn't want to see any of this occurring. And then, as you say, with this change to the capital gains tax, which to be clear, to lay out the policy for people was the government was proposing to increase the inclusion rate for capital gains on income earned over $250,000 from 50% to 66%. So basically, that means that when you received your capital gains over a quarter million dollars, instead of 50% of that being taxed, 66% of it would be taxed, right? So

it's not a 66% tax rate, it is just 66% of the earnings would have had tax applied to it. Of course, what we see now is that change has not actually come into effect and looks like it's not actually going to be realized. But as you're saying, this was a moment when a lot of these tech figures started to very publicly start speaking out against the government, against this policy in particular. But it seemed to be the moment where dissatisfaction with the Liberal Party in the tech industry really came out into the open and like gave them permission to then start saying a lot of the things that they've been saying and doing since, right? I would guess that a lot of these people had been drifting rightwards,

just based on how they talk on Twitter. As I studied their Twitterings, I would guess that a lot of them would have been sort of drifting rightward anyway. But this is the reason they're giving the capital gains tax proposal. And when we're talking about these tech folks, who would you say are some of the most prominent people within the tech industry in Canada who actually kind of have this public face? Because when we look down at the States, we know the Elon Musks and the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Jeff Bezos and, you know, these sorts of people, right? These are kind of like common household names that even people who don't pay a lot of attention to tech in general

would know, right? Even in Canada, not just in the United States. But I feel like in Canada, you know, these people are far less known than these major American figures. So who are some of the key people up here? So when we're talking about this story that we're going to be talking about, I think that the main people that have been kind of at the forefront of an effort to kind of combine tech and politics, you have to look at the company Shopify, which is like a very successful Canadian company that provides this like e-commerce model that small businesses can tap into to do online commerce. And they've been like incredibly

successful and have really been kind of like the darlings of like the tech industry in Canada. So I'll just leave it there because there are like a bunch of other supporters, but I feel like people probably wouldn't recognize the names. But let's just focus on Shopify. So we have the CEO, Tobias Lutke, and then a bunch of executives. And when we're going to be talking about this Build Canada effort that I wrote about, they seem to be like one of the key drivers behind it. Four of their executives are listed as supporters. Another executive left Shopify to actually focus on this government policy effort, Daniel DeBow. So when we're talking about this effort, I think Shopify is probably the

one that people would most know. And they've also like been notorious for like pretty extreme or what seem what appears to be like some rather extreme right wing slash right wing tech ideas as well. And I feel like if there is a tech executive in Canada who people would know about, it would probably be Tobias Lutke, right? The CEO of Shopify. And, you know, I did an episode last year with Rachel Gilmore and Luke LeBrun, who are also Canadian journalists talking about how this company has had this relationship with the right wing for a while defending stores that sold merchandise with hate speech and Nazi memorabilia and things like that and not taking them down off of the platform. And also the chief operations officer there,

Kaz Najatian, is the co-founder of a right-wing publication called True North that also shares a lot of really terrible right-wing views and tries to get them out into the public conversation. Yeah, True North News is really, really interesting. Kaz's wife, Candace Milcom, who's sort of the founder of it. I think they're based in Calgary, maybe, or several places, but they're really focused on ideas of like residential school denialism or downplaying and also questioning the unmarked graves investigations. That's how they kind of came to be on my radar. But yeah, they do have this link with Shopify that's also really interesting. Rachel and Luke have both done great work in just kind of highlighting how they have this idea that they want to defend free speech,

which we're all familiar with from like right wing politics in the US. And to them, that means like not taking stuff down, like, you know, store selling like Holocaust denial merchandise or anti LGBTQ stuff. And recently, they were in the news because Kanye West pulled a stunt where he like had one single t shirt for sale on his Shopify store that has swastika on it. Shopify did eventually pull it down, but not because it was hate speech. They pulled it down because it wasn't a genuine attempt to sell something. It wasn't a genuine attempt at commerce. So that was also reported. Yeah. They were worried that people wouldn't actually receive their swastika t-shirts. And so that's why they had to take it down. Big concern, right? It's too bad. You were talking about these folks at Shopify. There are some other

Canadian tech executives and people who are involved, but they're names that people would not be nearly as familiar with, right? It's the Shopify executives who are the real driving force, it feels like, behind a lot of these efforts and have been very outspoken. And people have been paying attention to what they've been saying, right? And it feels like they have given permission for these other less known folks in the Canadian tech industry to start being more vocal. And quite recently, they started this organization called Build Canada, which intends to start to promote some of these ideas. So what is Build Canada? Who is behind it? And what does it say it is trying to achieve? So Build Canada, maybe you'd be familiar with an effort from like

a business lobby group, like the Chamber of Commerce or like the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses or something like one of these like business groups that wants to talk to government, wants to promote, you know, lowering taxes for small business. Or if there's a policy that's really hobbling, like the wine industry, they'll go to government and they'll ask for changes. We're very familiar with this and it's like very normal. And so they've created this thing, a new one. For some reason, they wanted a new one all of their own. They contacted me after I published my story to ask me to change the term lobbyist. you know, everything from like, let's change how we're regulating the skilled trades to like, let's bring down interprovincial barriers to trade, which are the very normal business proposals, but then also some ones that would kind of like raise a little bit more questions like we want to eliminate 110,000 government positions because

the federal government has gotten too bloated. There's a weird one on making it easier to trial autonomous vehicles. And when you kind of drill into their policy, it's all about being annoyed at Toronto because Toronto didn't allow this company to like try out their sidewalk delivery robots. And when you look into it, it's like, because that's really bad

for like people with mobility challenges on the sidewalk and like city sidewalks are for people to get around the city, not necessarily for delivery robots. Anyways. Yeah. They're not free rows for delivery robots, you know. There's one new one that they put on that seems to be about vertical farming and it just happens to be written by like people who are involved in that industry, it looks like. Yeah. They're not lobbying. They're just getting ideas out there. There's a funny one by a company that makes like sort of AI enabled videos. And they're all about like, oh, we need to like make a whole bunch of videos that celebrate Canadian

identity. Like you just kind of imagine like some sort of AI slot. The AI slot version of Heritage Minutes. Yeah, it's just a real grab bag of weird things when you start to look at these policies. But there is this veneer of sort of respectability, right? There is this veneer of like, we're just talking about interprovincial trade, like everybody does. Daniel DeBow, who's like one of the key staffers behind this, he did an interview on the CBC's flagship morning show, The Current, being like, I'm a business person. And it's all geared around like, let's boost Canada's economy in response to the tariff threat. And that's really like the impetus behind it. We need to promote innovation. We need to promote the tech industry because this is

going to be good for Canada's economy. Oh, and build pipelines. Don't forget that. Oh, yeah, of course, which is a big tech issue, right? Yeah. There was another one there as well that I believe was around immigration too, right? Yes. So they want to really curtail any kind of humanitarian immigration. So like refugee programs, I don't know, would that include family reunification stuff? Who knows? And they want to refocus it specifically on wealthy people. So they want to make sure that people have quite a lot of money before they come into the country and like really highly skilled trades. And you know, it has to be said, like Canada's immigration system for a long time has been really focused on our point system, which values those things already. That was interesting to me. And it

really made me think about how the Liberals in 2015, they kind of got elected in part because at the time, Canadians are really angry at the Conservative government for not letting very many Syrian refugees into the country. And we looked really not very nice. But now the whole conversation on immigration has shifted. And a lot of Canadians are really angry about immigration and really angry about especially like international students. So that's definitely an interesting policy that's just thrown in there. Obviously, it made me think of the fact that Toby Lutke, the Shopify CEO, has been tweeting a lot about some of these right wing issues that we're seeing really preoccupying people in the United States. And among those has been immigration, you know, something he has been tweeting a lot about and how Canada's border is not strong enough,

all these sorts of things are he is kind of repeating and sharing and agreeing. Yeah, totally. We see these issues being embraced by these tech folks. And now they've set up this organization to try to advocate for these specific type of policies. Is there any indication yet that it's really cutting through or having an impact? Or is this still early days for a group like this? I think it's a little bit hard to know. It's not a very good effort. I have to say. When you look at their website, it just seems kind of mashed together. There's not a lot of cohesion. It just seems like a bunch of people have come together and are like, oh, I have an idea. I have an idea. And then they just put it up on their website. And then there's another website called Canada Spends that's all focused on government spending

that they don't really talk about a lot, but they do talk about it sometimes on X. And that website doesn't seem to have been updated recently. So I don't know what's going on with that. I do think that it would be pretty easy for these guys to get the ear of the federal conservatives, though. Like, I think there's no doubt that this may be just sort of like a little bit of a like attempt to like get a little bit of media coverage of their effort to like influence government. And then I don't think they'd have any trouble, you know, getting into a Pierre Palliot fundraiser or what have you. And just obviously, like these guys are powerful. They do have genuinely have these businesses that employ like thousands of people and they are the backbone of like Canada's tech industry.

So whether or not this website looks silly to me doesn't really matter. I think the fact that they've kind of made an attempt to do it and look like a serious effort is just probably good enough because, yeah, I'm sure that they would have no problem getting the ear of any politician. And I agree with you, right? When I first saw the Build Canada initiative, right, which would be a couple months ago now, or whenever it was launched, the first thing that came to my mind was a speech that Pierre Palliev, the conservative leader did about a year ago in front of the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce, where he was basically calling out companies for using these lobbyists and saying that their lobbyists were utterly useless. And that when he comes to government, because of course, a year ago, it looked like he would be a shoo-in to be the next prime minister. And as you were explaining to us,

it doesn't look as solid today. But at the time, the Conservative Party was far ahead of the liberals in the polls. It looked like it was just a matter of time before he was going to be prime minister. Basically, what he was saying to companies was, if you want us to adopt your policies, if you want us to care about what you're saying, you need to not just hire lobbyists and get them to talk to government, but you need to go out to the public and you need to make your case for why this is a policy that should be adopted. And of course, for me, as I was reading that, it was kind of like, by extension, you need to criticize the current government and kind of make the case for a conservative policy program that we could get behind, right? As the tech industry has become more outspoken, particularly since the capital gains moment, which again, was around that

time last year as well, that we have seen the tech industry getting increasingly vocal, increasingly critical of the liberal government, increasingly pushing these right-wing ideas around immigration, but these other issues too. And so when I saw Build Canada be launched, I said, this feels like exactly the type of thing that Pierre Polyev was looking for to get influential business leaders to really start making the case for a conservative government. And I feel like as recently as a few months ago, the tech industry probably felt this was a great effort because they were going to be in close with the next government and conservatives would take these policies that would be very beneficial to their industry. And now that feels much more up in the air than it would have been at that time.

It does. But I don't think they'd have any problem with pivoting and going to talk to Mark Carney as well, right? Like we'd probably be sympathetic to like delivering on some of these ideas. They've kind of just been able to put enough veneer respectability on this effort that I think there's ideas that any politician could pick and be like, we're going to do this and just be like, okay, checkmark, we got the tech industry. So we'll see. I think what's really interesting about this is that I think there are some people on this list of supporters who would be fine with like talking to either a conservative or a liberal government. But then yeah, when you look at the Shopify guys, those guys are like die hard, like Musk fanboys. And I'm just really curious about them. So I think they're just kind of like the wildcard in this whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. No, very good point. And just

to be clear for listeners, Mark Carney is the new leader of the Liberal Party. And by the time you listen to this, he will be the new prime minister and Canada might be in a federal election campaign. So he has replaced Justin Trudeau as the leader because as you were saying, Jan, Justin Trudeau resigned earlier this year, but didn't actually leave the post until a new party leader was chosen. I did want to pick up on what you were saying about Canada Spends though, right? This other website that is kind of alongside Build Canada that is not officially connected, but that does seem to be run by some of the same people and supported by some of the same people. The story that you wrote really focused on how there are a growing number of people within the Canadian tech industry who

are calling for the creation of a doge in Canada, right? Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to really dig into government spending and basically start gutting things like we're seeing happening in the United States. So how is Canada Spans related to that? And what are we actually seeing in this advocacy and desire by Canadian tech figures for a replication of what Elon Musk is doing down south? There had been like quite a number of stories about Build Canada. And then my editor was just like, why don't you look a little bit farther into it? Like, I don't do a lot of national politics and I certainly don't do business reporting anymore, though I did start in business reporting when I first started my career.

He was just like, why don't you just take a closer look at this? And when I started to look at these guys, I printed out all of the supporters of the effort and I just started going through their X account or their Twitter X slash X accounts. And I just started to see all of these references to Canada spends. And I was like, what is that? So the people who had been talking about Build Canada generally weren't talking about Canada spends like in the interviews that I saw that they were doing. But on x, they were like talking about this effort. They're like, okay, we have like Build Canada. And we also have Canada spends. And so I was like, what is Canada spends? I went to the website. And I hadn't been

reporting on Doge, obviously, because I'm in Canada, but I had been reading so much about Doge. I was fascinated by it. Wired was doing all that amazing reporting. And I had been going to the Doge website just being like, what the hell is this? And so as soon as I went to the Canada spends website, I was like, wait, it looks the same as Doge. There are like boxes with like a random thing about government spending. Like, did you know your government spends X on X with no context about like why, what is the program?

And then when you click on it, it goes to an X post. That's basically the same information with maybe a little bit more and like some sort of graph maybe because charts and graphs are cool. And I was like, what is this? It's a Doge website. And then I was like looking,

I was just looking through their X posts and like seeing what kind of stuff they tweet about. And yeah, quite a few of them were like really, really excited about Doge. And we're saying things like, I want a Doge in Canada. And we're just super psyched about it. And we're obviously some of them were like super into Elon Musk. So there was a whole gamut of things. And then there were the people who were like a little bit more sober who were like, well,

did you know Canada had a Doge back in the 90s, which is like a time when we were trying to tackle our big deficit and governments were cutting in an age of austerity, which a lot of other people living in other countries will kind of recognize that era. So there are people being like, well, no, this doge isn't scary. It's just like in the 90s, when we had to cut government spending, this is what it will be like. So kind of attempting to use doge as just like an analog for government spending. And then other people being like, yeah, well, I had no idea that we did this. It was really like brave of us. We need to do this again. Yeah. Just don't think about the consequences of the spending cuts that were made in the 90s, right? Yeah. I mean, getting into the heads of like

the conservative voter, it's a very like common thing in conservative politics to like want to cut government spending. And we do have a big deficit right now. So that's not shocking to me. But what was shocking to me was that some of these posts were being made back in December. And I was like, okay, like back in December, maybe they didn't know what Doge was. Some of the posts are being made in like February 19. And by that time, there had been already been like crazy stuff happening, like firing all the people who maintain and transport America's nuclear arsenal, like, and then having to, you know, there had been a bunch of like, really embarrassing and alarming things. USAID had been gutted. At that point, I was like, it's really interesting that these people still think that talking about Doge is going to be a

big winner. And it made me wonder about just the information ecosystem that these tech executives are living in. And I just found the whole thing super fascinating. It is fascinating, right? And when you talk about that information ecosystem, I know that you have also done some reporting on the way that Twitter X is seen in Canada right now. Obviously, earlier, we were talking about how there's this growing frustration with the United States, this growing anger at the United States within Canada, that has obviously in part by some people been targeted towards some of Elon Musk's businesses because he is so prominent. But there has also been this kind of ongoing concern about the role that Twitter X and especially since the changes that Musk has made to it, what that does to the

information ecosystem and the way that people converse online. And I should say it's not just Twitter X, it's also the meta platforms. Oh, Facebook is huge, yeah. Exactly, particularly in Canada because meta platforms don't allow the sharing of news. This has all contributed to this concern about what these platforms are doing to like the discourse and what people understand.

You know, you were mentioning earlier how your partner's coworkers were talking about like, you know, this kind of conspiracy stuff that goes around and are now talking about buying Canadian. But I see the same thing in people I know, right? It's stuff that they're picking up off of Facebook and kind of trusting because people they know are sharing it around or they're seeing it come up again and again and again, right? And so these messages kind of start to resonate with people because they see them so often. But I guess my question is, what do you make of this discussion about the impact that these platforms are having

on the discourse in Canada and how increasingly people see them in a negative sense? And since what's happening in the States, there have even been calls to investigate Twitter X or even ban it from Canada. Yeah, the federal NDP has been, which is sort of a more left-wing party, federal party in Canada. They've been really pushing for some sort of like elections Canada to investigate X. And just in terms of of is it election interference to have Elon Musk focus platform. And we know that Elon Musk does tons of stuff, you know, with his own account, which is like has over 200 million followers or something crazy like that. But it's like the entire population of the United States follows Elon Musk, apparently,

like that's kind of how you can think of it. It's kind of crazy. So yeah, he has his own account where he does tons of crazy stuff. You know, he promotes white supremacist ideas with his own account over and over and over again. Just the other day, there was a story about how he was promoting a tweet saying that Hitler didn't kill a lot of people. It was public workers who were working for the Nazi.

Like it's wild stuff that he's endorsing. So not only that, so his own account, but then we know that Twitter has also been like really promoting right wing discourse. The same thing is happening on Facebook right now, which is terrifying, because that's where parents and grandmas get their news. And that is absolutely a concern. And as you say, like in Canada, our liberal government did try to like protect Canadian news organizations by trying to get big tech companies like Google and Facebook to pay for Canadian news to like pay into a fund to kind of compensate the loss of ad revenue that news organizations have seen that has gutted

Canadian news. But in response, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram has shut off all links for Canadian news. So you can't promote any Canadian news on Facebook right now. So there's no like counterpoint for this stuff. And I was just reading a story last night, it was about the Canada Proud Facebook account, and how the founder of that is like really happy with meta right now, because it's really easy to promote this stuff. And meta has like made all these changes, making it easier to promote like right wing stuff. And I guess for people who aren't aware, that would kind of be like a right wing Facebook group, but that uses kind of, I guess, nationalist rhetoric to cloak these sorts of right wing narratives and is really popular. Would you say that's a good description?

Yeah, I think that's a great description. So just the same kind of concerns that people were concerned about with the 2016 American election, where people are all of a sudden waking up to the fact that like, there was a huge amount of foreign interference from Russia, but just like bad actors all over the place, just skewing what people see. It's really hard for people to even parse out stuff these days. I've seen stuff like stuff coming across my feed on Blue Sky even saying, oh, Netflix is making a deal with Andrew Tate to do a documentary and people believing it. And I'm like, ah, that doesn't seem right. And I go and fact check it and it's not true. It's really hard for people to figure out what is true and what's not these days.

So it's a terrifying environment to be going into a federal election. Yeah, you know, I know that you've also been looking into like how there are like popular white nationalist accounts and stuff like based in Canada that then get this kind of like broad appeal. And this is not entirely new. Like we have people like Jordan Peterson, who are Canadian, Lauren Southern, like we you know, we have been exporting. We've created a lot of these people. Exactly. Yeah. But now we have even more of them who are popular on these platforms and who are being followed by the likes of J.D. Vance and Elon Musk and being promoted by them. It's wild. Yeah. I just wrote a story about I'm following reporting by Stephen Monacelli, who's this like amazing investigative reporter from the States. He's been doing this really

great like research, investigative reporting, unmasking these anonymous accounts on Twitter that are white supremacist accounts. He had a story in the Texas Observer where he basically found that one of these accounts was a prosecutor for ICE cases or something. He also had this one where he was looking into this really popular account called CaptiveDreamer7 on X that Elon Musk and J.D. Vance have both interacted with. This account takes credit for bringing that like really racist story about Haitians supposedly eating cats and dogs to the attention of J.D. Vance. And so yeah, Monticelli just looked into this and found that this guy was apparently like from Abbotsford, BC. So at that point, I was like, okay, I'll do a follow on the story. It was really, really sobering to like, look into that account and really dig into it and see some of this stuff that he'd been saying about women, about all sorts of minorities.

You know, in Canada, we do have like a very specific kind of racism that's on the rise today. You know, you take some sort of video clip of non-white people in a shopping mall or walking on the street, not doing anything wrong, just living their lives. And you say, this is a problem with immigration. I recently wrote a story as well about a TikToker called Robin Skies. That's not his real name. His real name is Adam Beattie. But he had been making these videos, kind of similar videos showing like South Asian men just like walking on the street and saying this shows that immigrants are a danger to women. And I got a tip

that this guy was a BC conservative staffer. And so I said a story about that as well. So I've really gotten a look into how these people kind of flirt with sometimes flirting with respectability and sometimes not sometimes being a total anonymous account that does horrible things. But tactics are very, very similar, just showing people clips of people who are non white and like saying over and over again, this shows like problems with immigration, there are like legitimate concerns with certain immigration programs in Canada, right? But it's just, you see this over and over and over again. The result for society is ultimately not going to be good. I completely agree. Right. And there are legitimate issues in the sense that the government

let a bunch of people in without building the necessary infrastructure, you know, the necessary housing and social services to accommodate the population. You know, like immigration is not a problem. It's just making sure you have the services to support the amount of people you want to bring in. I'm very pro increasing immigration in Canada. But yeah, we just need to build the homes and the public services and stuff to accommodate it so that you don't have this kind of backlash that can be stoked up against these people who come in and who are just trying to make a better life, right? Yeah, but I almost feel like, you know, there's genuine concerns, but these bad actors kind of get in there and they twist and they twist until you almost can't talk about the genuine concerns anymore, because it just has become so bound up in just outright racism and white supremacy.

And that's happening with a bunch of issues, you know, like these far right content creators also love to talk about made in Canada, medical assistance and dying. And we have like some of the most liberal made regulations in the world. And that has become a real focus as well. So it's like, there's these issues that are like, yes, these are real issues that people want to talk about, but they just are being grabbed by these right wing content creators and twisted to the point that it's just propaganda, basically. Yeah. And there are some people that we know are like Russian propagandists who like love making this content. So that's another aspect.

I completely agree with you, right? Like there are some issues that just become so much more difficult to talk about because they are grabbed by the right and reframed in these ways. You know, I feel like when we talk about Canada, or there can be this perception that like, oh, you know, we see these things happening in the United States, we see it invading the politics in the United States, but Canada is sort of immune from that. I wonder how you see those sorts of narratives from this like more populist right from this kind of more extreme right wing that seem to be circulating more and more on social media, making their way into conservative movements within Canada, because obviously, you had an experience with that recently in British Columbia with the BC Conservatives. But I feel like we see it more and more in

Alberta, Saskatchewan, obviously the Federal Conservative Party. So what do we see there? Yeah, Western Canada is a real hotbed of very Trump adjacent right wing politics. So we know that in Alberta, with the United Conservative Party and Danielle Smith being the premier in that province, like she is very into that world. She has sort of like semi promoted or like taken seriously conspiracy theories. She's kind of been the fly in the ointment in this whole like effort to oppose tariffs because she's been sort of carrying water for Donald Trump and saying that his concerns are genuine. And she's been going off script and like doing her own meetings. In my province, British Columbia, we just had a provincial election where we saw the BC Conservative Party, which was this really moribund party. It hadn't really been doing much in the elections ever. They never really got elected. The party was kind of taken over by these young right wing agitator guys who were really like

big, huge fans of Jordan Peterson and had been at university in the sort of 2016-2017 period and had really absorbed all this stuff about like standing up for quote free speech. And yeah, really big fans of a lot of these right wing content creators, including Lauren Southern, one of the key architects of the BC Conservative Party has like invited her to talks. And just to be clear, like Lauren Southern is a very, very extreme far right person who is from also from BC. So we saw this and we saw as the provincial election sort of went along, the business community like really started supporting the BC Conservatives. And we saw the BC Liberals, which were kind of the centre right party just

fold and say, Oh, you should all support the BC Conservatives, we're just not going to even fight very interesting, quite alarming election campaign. There was a lot of candidates past comments came out about stuff they'd said about residential school denialism, outright racism, a lot of racism. And it was just kind of the party had this stance of like, well, we don't do cancel culture, we're just going to let the voters decide. And a few of these people actually did get elected. And it causes problems if a bunch of your comments about like, really, really bad racism against Muslim people, for instance, have come out during the election. Well, then if you get elected, like then you kind of have to deal, you have like a huge Muslim population in your own community. Well, where does that leave us? So it was a very like

disturbing election to cover, frankly. Even watching it from afar, it was concerning to see just how quickly that shift in the conservative movement in British Columbia happened, right? How the BC conservatives almost, you know, won government. It was like 22 votes or something. You know, it was a huge result for them. They went from being basically a totally moribund non-entity in the BC political landscape to being the official opposition. And we're seeing the party just continue to be like kind of unstable. You know, there's been like three MLAs who've just laughed over being very firm that they want to continue to push these residential school denialist comments, which is a huge issue in BC because we have

a very strong like indigenous community here. It's very involved in politics. We had lots of residential schools. It's like so painful to watch this play out. You know, I thought our society was making strides on that issue and like reconciliation. Yeah, it's very disheartening to see people just absolutely go to the mat insisting on saying these very extremely hurtful things. It absolutely is. And there should be no place for it in the public discourse. Like it should be called out immediately and shut down. You know, you were talking about the business community there. And I want to pivot back to talking about the tech industry as we close off our conversation. You know, we're seeing these folks with Shopify and these other folks in the Canadian tech industry

increasingly push these right wing policy ideas and try to advocate for them, make these alliances with the Conservative Party. Down in the United States, we can obviously see these executives from Silicon Valley have been very key in the coalition that Donald Trump relied on to get elected and now have a lot of power in shaping government policy. In Canada, does the tech industry and do tech executives have that same degree of influence? Or because the Canadian economy is different and the tech industry doesn't seem to be as large of a part of that, is there kind of a bit less concern that they could have a similar type of role up here? I wonder what you make of that. That's a good question. I'm not sure if I completely know the answer to it. I would just warn and say, I don't know if it's like, yes, there's a tech industry here. I would look more at energy. I would just warn and say like, I don't know if it's like, yes, there's a tech industry here. I would look more at like energy. I would look more at oil and gas.

Oil and gas has always been like pretty aggressive about trying to push their message. And we can see that a lot, even in the build Canada stuff, we see that there's like oil and gas stuff in there. I would pay a little bit more attention to like what oil and gas are saying. In British Columbia, it's always about real estate. So that's just something to do with our province. We're a bit wacky. I think oil and gas in the past has been a little bit more like politically influential than tech,

but you know, maybe things are changing. And with them sort of allying with this US tech ideas, one like fun thing is that the Shopify executives, Tobias Lokian and Kaz Nadeshian, they were guests on this podcast made by Balaji Srinivasan called The Network State. So Balaji is this really interesting person in Silicon Valley who has this idea that companies should actually run their own countries. And he's put out some wild ideas about what that would look

like that kind of sound like fascism. There's just like a bundle of really strange ideas that the tech world is putting out. And so when I say like, I'm not really sure if the tech industry in Canada is that large, I still think it's interesting to track them because they are tapped into this like international set of ideas that are very bizarre, but that are really, really popular in some circles, because I guess they think that this is the future and they want to be cool and hip and on the cutting edge. And I think it's like really interesting for us just to be aware that we have these people, you know, in our own country, we don't normally think of Canada as a super tech powerhouse, but it's like, they seem to be all in the same circles, interested in these ideas. We need to track it and just make sure that we know what exactly they're talking about,

where these ideas come from, so that when we see them showing up in government, we can kind of at least call it out and be like, hey, this is this idea. And they might have like sanitized it to make it sound normal, but it's not. It's bananas. I feel like we pay a lot of attention in Canada to what is happening in the United States, you know, and rightfully so. We need to understand what's happening down there. But sometimes that can cause us to maybe not see what's happening in our own backyard sometimes because what's happening down south can be so sensationalist and so interesting to pay attention to. But obviously, you know, looking at what Build Canada, what the Shopify guys are doing is very important to what is going to be happening here. I wonder

now if I'm going to have to punish myself by listening to that podcast episode to see what they were saying. I listened. I don't know if I'd recommend it, but the Shopify guys seemed really interested. And Balaji kept saying that Shopify is as big as a country. Like he's kept on saying like your, he was sort of like your GDP is basically like a small country. And they agreed. So take that as you will. I like your point about looking at the oil industry as well, right?

Because I think one of the things that we've seen too is looking at Alberta in particular, they have consistently tried to promote certain technologies and tech industries to try to create new markets for oil and gas and natural gas and things like that, right? And Alberta is, well, Kevin O'Leary is promising to build a big data center in Alberta for AI. We think of tech as being like green and new and future focused. But in some cases, they're really, really aligned with oil and gas and energy. So with their like enormous need for energy. So I think that's also something to keep in mind. Just to end off our conversation, I wonder if there is anything else that we didn't talk about that's related to this that you think is important for the listeners to know? And where

do you think things go from here? Because Canada is, as I was saying, is headed into a federal election. By the time people hear this, it will probably already have been called. So what are you paying attention to and looking for in the next little while? What I'm laser focused on right now in my own reporting, and I'm normally a very Vancouver focused reporter, I normally report on City Hall, actually, but I started reporting really closely on the BC provincial election. And I've decided to keep on reporting on trends in right wing politics as the federal election approaches, just because there's so much going on. And there's just so many like new concepts that people aren't really fully aware of that I think just need to be explained to people. People we're seeing in

our own readers that there's just this endless appetite for just information on what the hell is happening. You know, the threat to Canadian sovereignty has just boosted that interest like exponentially. And you know, when we're talking about these tech CEOs kind of interested in these outlandish ideas, I do think that there is going to be, I think it's already started in Canada, kind of an extreme backlash to those tech kind of ideas because of we're just seeing them implemented in them in such an extreme way in the United States. So I'm going to be watching all of that. I'm going to be really closely watching like how the conservatives try to position themselves and what ideas they're backing away from, what ideas they're sticking to as we head into this election. And then also like keeping track of just the groups on the margins, like weird Facebook groups

and like weird ex accounts and just the information ecosystem is also going to be a huge one for me. I think so too. And the one thing I would just add to what you were saying that I'm watching as well is also how the liberal party orients itself toward the tech industry now, because as you mentioned before, it's possible that they could try to make a better relationship with Mark Carney, and I think who is the liberal leader now. And I think one thing that we've seen is Carney kind of suggesting that he is open to that sort of a thing by promoting the notion that Canada does need to be embracing AI and trying to look for AI investment. And I was speaking to James Meadway a couple weeks ago about what's happening in the UK. And for me, I see a lot of overlaps between what Mark Carney is talking about on AI and what we have seen Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister over there doing as well, which have been very concerning for a lot of people to see the policy decisions made there. So I think there is definitely opportunity for some convergence to happen there, even if the Conservative Party doesn't ultimately come to power. And I guess we'll find that out probably in late April or May.

That episode you did with that speaker just opened my eyes. I normally don't follow UK politics that closely. And I was like, oh my god, they privatized their water? I didn't know that. But yeah, I thought that was fascinating. And I think we know that Mark Carney has just come back, spent a lot of time in the UK. He was the Bank of England governor. And so, yeah, one would think that he maybe has absorbed quite a few ideas from that country as well. And I think that's huge. I think, you know, everything we know about him is that he's a centrist and that's where

he's kind of seen as strong right now because they're trying to pull like sort of center right votes away from the conservatives. But that's something that is going to be really interesting to track. Jen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me to go through all this. We pay a lot of attention to what happens in the States, but especially as there's this growing frustration with what happens in America, and it's trying to push out these ideas to be understanding what's happening in other places too. So I'm hoping to do some episodes like this on Europe as well.

But thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. This is a pleasure. Jen St. Denis is a reporter with the TAI. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham.

Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.