The Tech CEOs Who Want a DOGE for Canada

“I want DOGE to exist in Canada,” Shane Parrish, who runs a self-help website and newsletter aimed at executives, wrote on Dec. 19.

“If anyone is obsessed with reading the bills, going through the results, making this a full-time job, and publicizing it on X non-partisanly, contact me.” Parrish promised that he and Shopify president Harley Finkelstein would help fund the effort.

And even as DOGE, or the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, has created controversy and chaos, some members of a group of tech CEOs have shown interest in creating a similar agency in Canada.

DOGE, headed by billionaire Elon Musk at the behest of Donald Trump, has generated a series of bizarre and troubling headlines.

Musk’s team fired staff at a nuclear arms agency, then struggled to recall them; sought access to millions of Americans’ private tax and social security data; abruptly shuttered the international aid agency USAID; gutted a consumer protection agency; halted health research; and destabilized the entire U.S. federal workforce.

This week, Musk admitted his agency had mistakenly cut funding to prevent Ebola, while 21 staffers resigned because of concerns they were being asked to “dismantle critical public services.”

In Canada, a group of tech CEOs has come up with a political public relations effort called Build Canada, with the stated goal of strengthening the economy in the face of Trump’s threat to impose punishing tariffs. Trump has repeatedly linked the tariffs to annexing Canada and making our country the “51st state.”

So far, Build Canada’s website offers a series of short policy statements calling for 110,000 jobs to be cut from the federal public service over four years, AI to be used in government services, interprovincial trade barriers to come down and the federal government to step in to compel provinces and municipalities to allow autonomous vehicles and delivery robots. There are also calls for immigration for humanitarian reasons to be sharply curtailed in favour of higher-income and highly skilled immigrants, and to fund content creators to tell inspiring stories about Canada.

But Build Canada is connected to another website called Canada Spends that looks a lot like the DOGE.gov website.

“If you’re interested in Canada’s future, follow @build_canada for real ideas from people who build businesses in Canada and @canada_spends to see where your tax dollars actually go,” Parrish posted on Feb. 6. Other supporters of Build Canada have also promoted Canada Spends, and in her X bio, Build Canada staffer Lucy Hargreaves says she is working on both Build Canada and Canada Spends.

Just like the DOGE website, Canada Spends offers a series of boxes containing random information about government spending; and like DOGE.gov, clicking on the box takes you to a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk bought in 2022.

The Tyee contacted Build Canada to ask about Canada Spends and the calls from several Build Canada supporters to introduce a DOGE-like effort in Canada but did not receive a response.

We also attempted to contact the supporters who expressed support for DOGE through their companies or social media accounts, but received a reply from just one, Rob Khazzam, the CEO of Float Financial. Khazzam — who shared the post from Parrish that called for a DOGE-like effort in Canada — said he’s excited about the Build Canada initiative but declined an interview.

In addition to Parrish and Finkelstein, another Build Canada supporter, Mike Murchison, the CEO of an AI customer service company called Ada, wrote a lengthy post on Dec. 5 praising the DOGE effort.

On Feb. 13, Hargreaves posted a message on X pushing back against the “DOGE haters.”

“You should know that Canada had its own version of DOGE in the 1990s, led by the Liberals,” she wrote. “It was called program review. It reigned in spending and eliminated the deficit.”

Brice Scheschuk, CEO of Globalive and a Build Canada supporter, quote-tweeted Hargreaves in support of the idea.

“I had no idea Canada did such a hard thing in recent times,” he said. “We can do it again.”

Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, reposted a tweet calling for DOGE and complaining about Canadian government spending on an aid program in Africa, quote-tweeted a post from DOGE with the message “Inefficiency has its own Gringotts!” and reposted a tweet that expressed concern that the identities of “the good and the young” DOGE staffers had been revealed by news media.

Several of the Build Canada supporters frequently retweet Elon Musk or defend him in the face of criticism.

On Jan. 21, the day after Musk made two Nazi salutes at a rally at Trump’s inauguration, Shopify’s vice-president of engineering, Farhan Thawar, posted: “If your private chats are all about @elonmusk’s supposed salute instead of the speed and direction of Donald Trump’s executive orders, then you should change chat groups.”

Build Canada lists 29 supporters, most of whom are CEOs of Canadian tech companies. Four of those supporters currently work at Shopify, and one of Build Canada’s staffers, Daniel Debow, is a former Shopify executive. The Canadian e-commerce company has been under scrutiny for allowing customers to sell merchandise with homophobic or Holocaust denial messages and for suddenly closing a diversity initiative that supported Black, Indigenous and female entrepreneurs.

After The Tyee sent Shopify and Build Canada an interview request for this story, Build Canada’s “About” page was edited to remove the list of supporters. But the list can still be found in an archived version of the page.

Government spending is often a concern for right-leaning parties. As Canada braces for punishing tariffs imposed by Trump, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been promising to get the ballooning federal deficit under control.

Several prominent Canadian tech CEOs, who are also supporters of Build Canada, have recently thrown their support behind Poilievre, as reported by the Logic. The Logic compared Canadian tech’s drift to the right to tech leaders in the United States moving their support to Trump.

Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, a researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said the Build Canada/Canada Spends initiative is being presented as an apolitical effort to improve government efficiency, but it’s clear there is “an ideological underpinning to it.”

Mertins-Kirkwood said no one opposes the idea of governments spending efficiently, and Canada has a parliamentary budget officer who examines federal finances and reports to Parliament regularly.

“We absolutely need accountability in government, but that's not really what DOGE is,” Mertins-Kirkwood said.

“It's about breaking government. It's hard to know with these tech leaders if what they're saying is ‘We want efficiency,’ or if that's just kind of the Trojan horse for ‘We want to blow up government.’”

Musk’s erratic effort to cut government spending has been cheered by supporters of Trump’s MAGA movement, many of whom believe there is widespread corruption in the government. Without showing proof, Musk has played on those conspiracy fears, saying he asked hundreds of thousands of federal workers to email him with five things they did in the previous week in an attempt to root out “non-existent people or the identities of dead people... being used to collect paychecks.”

Some of DOGE’s initial cuts have been hastily reversed, including the firing of workers who maintain the United States’ arsenal of nuclear weapons and cancer research related to the 9/11 terrorist attack.

DOGE has also targeted watchdog agencies that would be or are involved in regulating Musk’s business ventures, which include Tesla, SpaceX and X.

Some of the Build Canada supporters are openly supportive of Musk and the DOGE effort in the United States, while others are saying a cost-cutting initiative in Canada would look more like 1990s efforts to get spending under control.

But given the extreme nature of DOGE’s activities in the United States, Mertins-Kirkwood said he’d like more clarity on exactly what the goals of the Build Canada/Canada Spends initiative are.

“Everyone wants to get more for less,” he said. “I just see this all as being kind of thinly veiled, classic conservatism — trying to advance privatization and deregulation under the veil of efficiency and these other kind of innocuous-sounding terms that are very separated from the public interest.”

*Story updated on Feb. 28 at 10:45 p.m. to correct information on Build Canada’s plan for federal job cuts and clarify it is not a registered lobbyist.