Build Canada Is Not DOGE, Says Spokesperson

A spokesperson for Build Canada and Canada Spends says the effort to influence government policy and raise awareness of public spending is not trying to emulate billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial DOGE initiative in the United States.

Daniel Debow spoke to The Tyee following the publication of an earlier story in February that pointed out that several of the supporters of Build Canada had praised Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and called for the adoption of a similar initiative in Canada.

The story also noted that the Canada Spends website shared similar formatting and content as the DOGE.gov site, notably the use of government spending facts in boxes that link to posts on X, the social media platform Musk owns.

“I just don't think it's a very Canadian approach,” Debow told The Tyee. “It's not how I would do things, so I can speak for myself — I’m not in any way trying to replicate [DOGE] and it's also not the inspiration of anything that I'm interested in working on.”

Musk’s DOGE initiative has led to chaos inside the federal government in the United States: thousands of workers have been fired and entire agencies have been decimated, most notably the foreign aid program USAID. The decision to swiftly shutter USAID could lead to hundreds of thousands of people dying from malnourishment and disease, according to an analysis by the New York Times. DOGE has also targeted watchdog agencies that would be or are involved in regulating Musk’s business ventures, which include Tesla, SpaceX and X.

Critics have said Musk’s cuts are not really about saving money or making government more efficient but aim to “break government.” Both Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump have pushed the idea that there is widespread fraud in government to their followers.

‘People are engaging with the ideas’

Build Canada was unveiled in early February as a website that included a number of policy memos on subjects like interprovincial trade, immigration, autonomous vehicles and promoting Canadian culture. Debow said the effort is intended to bring Canadian entrepreneurs together at a time when the country’s economy and sovereignty are being threatened by Trump’s promises to levy punishing tariffs on Canada.

“Our goal was to broaden the conversation and make it possible for these patriotic Canadians, these entrepreneurs, to join the conversation in an actionable and specific way,” said Debow, who has left his job as vice-president of the Canadian e-commerce firm Shopify to work on Build Canada.

“And it seems to be doing that — people are engaging with the ideas. We've heard back that people in the policy organizations, people in the community appreciate the ideas.”

While neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have endorsed Build Canada’s proposals, Debow said he’s glad to hear the term “build Canada” being used by both campaigns.

Debow said a companion website to Build Canada, called Canada Spends, is the brainchild of Lucy Hargreaves. Hargreaves leads global corporate affairs and policy at Patch, a carbon markets software platform, according to her LinkedIn account. Canada Spends uses publicly available databases from the Government of Canada to display facts about government spending.

Several of Canada Spends’ posts focus on spending in Indigenous services and foreign aid.

Hargreaves wrote a Feb. 19 post on X addressed to the “DOGE-haters” and comparing DOGE to a 1990s-era government spending review. But Debow said social media posts don’t tell the whole story.

“It's sort of like a conceptual leap that was not supported by what we were repeatedly saying and what we were writing,” Debow said. “It was like taking a couple of the tweets and saying that's the whole story.”

In a lengthy X post published on Dec. 19, Shane Parrish, a podcaster and newsletter writer, said he wanted “DOGE to exist in Canada” and offered to work on a similar effort along with Shopify executive Harley Finkelstein. But that wasn’t the genesis of Build Canada or Canada Spends, Debow told The Tyee.

Parrish, who was listed as a supporter of Build Canada until the group removed that list from its website, deleted his tweet shortly after The Tyee’s initial story was published. He corresponded with The Tyee via email before publication of this story but did not agree to an interview and did not answer questions about his views on Musk’s DOGE initiative.

“I don't want to speak for Shane because I honestly don't know what was in his head,” Debow said. “The only thing for Build Canada that came out of that was, I think, a number of people volunteered, and I think potentially some of the folks who were in the team put their hands up from that project.”

On April 14, Parrish published a podcast episode featuring an interview with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. Parrish has said he also wants to interview Liberal Leader Mark Carney.

Canada Spends pushes misinformation, says expert

Jennifer Robson is an associate professor in public policy at Carleton University who raised her concerns with Canada Spends’ DOGE-like approach in a Feb. 24 blog post.

Robson said some of the information Canada Spends is putting out is simply misinformation. For instance, a post about government revenue losses implies that the Canada Revenue Agency lost over $200 million in 2024, when, Robson says, the figure refers to tax cases that are still before the courts.

Another Canada Spends post suggests there is something fishy about $40 billion in spending during the federal election (the group later corrected its tweet to acknowledge Parliament is dissolved, not prorogued):

“The government approved $40B in spending from April 1 to May 15 through a special warrant. This was done because Parliament is prorogued and it’s not possible to make appropriations,” Canada Spends tweeted.

“The only information shared with Canadians is a list of departments and the total amount. According to the document, ‘the appropriate Ministers have reported that the payment of these sums is urgently required for the public good.’ We’ll leave it to you to decide.”

Robson said that when federal elections coincide with funding supply periods, there’s a long-established procedure to allow government money to continue to flow to various programs. The money that’s disbursed has already been approved by Parliament, and when lawmakers return, they can retroactively scrutinize the funds.

“This just comes back to my deep concern that there is something about this project that is aimed at ginning up public anger through the mishandling of information,” Robson said.

Ties to Shopify

In response to Robson’s identification of errors, Debow said the team working on Canada Spends is small and made up of volunteers who are moving quickly, so they will make mistakes from time to time. He said the volunteers who are working on the project do take into account responses from readers who send corrections or make community notes, a fact-checking feature on X.

While the X post about the $40 billion in spending sparked several angry comments about government misspending money and lacking transparency, Debow said Canada Spends can’t control how people comment on the internet.

Debow said he’s been contacted by several former high-level government staffers and public policy experts who have praised his team’s work.

Build Canada has also received scrutiny because initially a number of its supporters were current or former Shopify executives. The company has become known for its controversial policies on free speech that led to the company refusing to remove online stores that sold Holocaust denial merchandise or anti-LGBTQ2S+ items.

In February, Shopify was again in the news for waiting 24 hours to remove Kanye West’s online store after the musician used his Shopify store to sell a T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika.

Kaz Nejatian, COO of Shopify, is also co-founder of the far-right news site True North. The outlet frequently publishes articles that question the extent of residential school abuses or deaths.

Debow acknowledged that among the early supporters of Build Canada, the number of Shopify executives stood out — but he said that was only because he had worked at Shopify in the recent past and reached out initially to people in his own circles. He said that Build Canada has grown over the past few months, and there are now over 100 entrepreneurs involved.

The ‘tech libertarianism’ view

Jaigris Hodson is an associate professor at Royal Roads University who studies digital communication. She said it’s important to understand the ideas behind Musk’s DOGE effort and the influence of “tech libertarianism” ideas that have become popular in Silicon Valley and influential in the current Trump administration.

“They don't like regulations, they don't like paying a lot of taxes,” Hodson said. “They feel like they’ve earned everything. And most of them believe that technology is what’s going to get us there. So [it includes] the idea that tech platforms should run unencumbered from regulations or taxes because it's in the best interest of society. But really, it's in the best interest just of the billionaires that are running the tech.”

Some of Build Canada’s supporters have also expressed interest in the ideas of Balaji Srinivasan, a tech entrepreneur who has become a proponent of an idea called the “network state.” Parrish interviewed Srinivasan twice on his podcast The Knowledge Project, once in 2020 and once in 2022. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and COO Kaz Nejatian were guests on the second episode of Srinivasan’s The Network State podcast in 2023. On that episode, Srinivasan suggested that Shopify had grown to have “a country-sized economy.”

The idea behind the network state is that companies could operate and govern city states. In a 2023 podcast, Srinivasan laid out a vision for a city where residents who work for tech companies and residents who have right-wing viewpoints would be favoured and protected by police, while residents with left-leaning political views would be ostracized.

“The network state is what many people high up in the tech world think is a natural or inevitable successor to the nation,” Hodson said. “It’s this idea that maybe democracy has kind of run its course, and people want a sort of nation-state, often tax-free. It’s a place to join up with other like-minded people, where the CEOs or the people who have been very successful become the de facto rulers of this new state.”

Adoption of cryptocurrency is also a popular idea among tech libertarians, Hodson said, because it’s not tied to any government. Cryptocurrency adoption is now popping up in politics: Trump has promised to create a national bitcoin reserve and is expected to relax regulations that have limited banks’ involvement in the industry. In Canada, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim has promoted converting some of the city’s reserve funds to bitcoin, and Poilievre promised to make Canada the crypto capital of the world during his leadership campaign in 2022.

While many of the policy memos Build Canada has published include suggestions on reducing regulations and push for greater adoption of AI and cryptocurrency, Debow said it’s unfair to assume Build Canada is influenced by some of the more extreme tech-libertarian ideas coming out of Silicon Valley and made popular by figures like Musk. He said his work on Build Canada is fuelled by a passion to help Canadian companies succeed at a time of great economic uncertainty.

“Our businesses have to grow,” he said. “They have to grow really fast if we're going to really, truly become more independent and resilient against America.

“That's the important common bond to understand where I'm coming from and where I think Build Canada is coming from. It is a genuine desire to help the country grow, because we know that if we have growing businesses, we have the tax base to support the social programs.”

Debow added that one of the biggest problems he’s heard of from people with experience working in government is that it’s difficult to fire civil servants. Build Canada is suggesting that 110,000 federal government jobs be cut.

“It doesn't matter whether you run a not-for-profit, a newspaper, a small business, a restaurant,” Debow said. “If you tell people you cannot fire anybody ever, it's really hard to have a great organization.”