As Elon Musk flexes his newfound political muscle around in the United States to potentially shut down the government because he doesn’t like the length of a spending bill, those of us who see how important it is to constrain the power of tech billionaires need to be looking not just at the United States, but how their political influence may grow next year.
Musk has already been courting the global far right this past year, but we’re already seeing worrying signs that this conservative-tech alliance is solidifying in other parts of the world. Brexit architect Nigel Farage visited Musk in Mar-a-Lago in recent days, and Musk is now debating whether to donate to his political party Reform UK, as polls show it’s neck-and-neck with the traditional Conservative and Labour parties.
Meanwhile, Musk has endorsed the neo-Nazi party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the German election, with a tweet saying, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” I have little doubt we’re bound to see more of that in 2025.
There’s another angle of this story I feel isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Musk has also been tweeting about Canada, and it remains to be seen what he might try to do when the country goes to an election next year. But there’s a deeper story to be told there.
Canada’s big domestic tech company is Shopify, and its leaders have embraced increasingly extreme right-wing positions over the past few years. Now, their relationship to the Conservative Party (with the most extreme leader it’s had in years) is coming out into the open — as they express support for bringing Silicon Valley’s agenda up north, regardless of the consequences for most of the public.
I wrote about what’s happening in Canada for The Breach and they’ve allowed me to share the entire story with Disconnect readers. I think it shows why we need to be on guard not just for what tech billionaires are doing in the United States, but how their ambitions are already spreading globally.
This past weekend, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre took a short break from bashing the Liberal Party and endlessly parroting his highly-disciplined platform to heap praise on ecommerce platform Shopify.
In a post on X, Poilievre wrote that Shopify is “the most spectacular entrepreneurial Canadian success story in this century,” and singled out CEO Tobias Lütke and COO Kaz Nejatian, who have both attacked the Liberal government, for having “the backbone to stand up and fight for all entrepreneurs.”
Back in May, Poilievre had lambasted corporate executives in front of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, saying their lobbyists were “utterly useless” and they needed to make their case to Canadians, as he tried to position the Conservative Party as the true champion of “the working-class people of this country.”
Six months later, his adoration for Shopify is only reinforcing that message. “Corporate Canada needs to learn from them in every way,” he posted, suggesting executives should be following their example with harsh criticisms of their own on the governing Liberals.
Many Canadians have spent the past few months glued to the U.S. election cycle, watching Donald Trump succeed in his bid to return to the White House and remake American politics. One of the central stories of that cycle has been the solidifying alliance between Trump’s MAGA movement and the billionaires of Silicon Valley.
We’ve gone from seeing Elon Musk jump around like a fool on stage at a Trump rally to now having him head a fake government department that could have very real impacts on policy and spending decisions—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
As we watch the reconfiguration of the oligarchy ruling the United States in real time, far too few Canadians have realized a similar story is already playing out at home.
Poilievre seems poised to seize power within the next year, and his embrace of an increasingly radicalized tech leadership should be ringing alarm bells.
Shopify’s leadership circle a hotbed of hard-right politics
We’re used to relying on the services of American monopolistic tech companies like Google or Amazon for our purchases, but if you’ve bought goods online from a small business or independent merchant, there’s a good chance you’ve made an order through a Shopify-powered storefront.
Headquartered in downtown Ottawa, Shopify is currently the second-largest publicly traded company in Canada, after its value soared by almost 50 percent following the U.S. election.
Shopify’s mission might be “making commerce better for everyone,” but the retail giant’s leadership seems to have embraced a secondary goal: to return the Conservative Party to government.
Scrolling Lütke’s Twitter feed, you’re likely to find a bunch of Shopify boosterism mixed with an embrace of far right-wing political ideas.
In recent weeks, he’s called for Canada Post to be gutted, positioned himself as “anti unions” that threaten his customers’ livelihoods, and opposed the right to strike.
He has also praised Trump’s threat to enact 25 per cent tariffs on Canada, stating that the U.S. is “within its rights” to do so. He has retweeted postscalling for social support programs to be cut because “Canada spends billions on illegals, asylum and refugees.” And he’s generally spread right-wing misinformation about the state of Canada and the world.
Lütke’s statements are well at home at Shopify, where he is one of several high-up execs regularly espousing right-wing views.
Shopify president Harley Finkelstein isn’t as outspoken, but he still frequently criticizes government policy. He was particularly outraged this summer when the Liberals increased the capital gains inclusion rate, which required 0.13 per cent of the richest Canadians to pay a bit more tax.
Finkelstein called the tax “divisive and political” and argued it would kill business investment in Canada, accusations levied as part of a broader campaign against the tax organized by a tech industry lobby group.
The right-wing ringleader among Shopify’s executive leadership appears to be Kaz Nejatian, the company’s vice-president of product and chief operating officer.
Before going into tech, Nejatian was a Conservative political staffer.
In 2011, when Nejatian worked for then-immigration minister Jason Kenney, he was forced to resign after mistakenly sending out fundraising requests on parliamentary letterhead and accidentally leaking a strategy to target “very ethnic” voters. Two months later, he was invited back as director of communications.
Nejatian’s right-wing associations became even clearer in 2017, when he and his partner Candice Malcolm, a former columnist at the Toronto Sun, took over a charity called True North and turned it into a right-wing media organization.
He joined Shopify in 2019, and rose to become its chief operating officer in 2022.
In the years since, True North has become a major player in Canada’s far-right media network, publishing anti-immigrant, transphobic and racist content, and pushing far-right talking points.
As Nejatian rose through Shopify’s ranks, he and Malcolm were “one of the largest donors to True North,” as Malcolm told PressProgress in July.
Earlier this year, True North published an interview between one of their main personalities, Harrison Faulkner, and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys—a far-right group that has been designated a terrorist entity in Canada.
Though the interview was later scrubbed from the True North website, PressProgress reported that it featured Faulkner and McInnes making racist jokes and denigrating immigrants.
Faulkner has a history of engaging with far-right groups and spreading misinformation and extremist talking points, such as falsely connecting Canadian wildfires to arson in a 2023 video for True North.
Shopify’s right-wing leadership has also influenced the company’s decisions about who and what it will provide its services for.
In 2017, Lütke published a Medium post entitled “In Support of Free Speech” to justify his decision to provide Shopify services for far-right media group Breitbart.
But Lütke hasn’t let every extremist using his services slide by. In 2018, Shopify banned a number of right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys, from using the platform, took down QAnon merchandise in 2020, and removed Donald Trump’s store in January 2021.
However, when controversy escalated over extremist anti-LGBTQ+ influencer Libs of TikTok and other merchants selling Nazi memorabilia on Shopify in late 2022, the company refused to take action.
Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Check My Ads, claimed at the time that Shopify employees pointed to Nejatian as the reason for the more extreme approach, even though allowing such sellers went against the company’s Acceptable Use Policy.
Earlier this year, independent journalist Rachel Gilmore reported that Shopify continues to provide services to far-right and extremist groups and individuals, including the Daily Wire, Rebel News, and Alex Jones’ post-InfoWars merch store.
Gilmore noted that not only had the sale of Nazi-themed items continued, but that Shopify had actually changed its Acceptable Use Policy to remove prohibitions on hate speech and harassment.
While Shopify wasn’t always so hardline about defending the far right’s use of its platform, the company’s right-wing drift has increasingly become official corporate policy.
Big tech trying to muscle in on policy
When Poilievre praised Shopify in December, his post built on one made by Nejatian complaining about the government’s GST/HST tax break and how it would inevitably harm the “very businesses our country relies on.”
The Shopify COO’s tweet criticized the government for its two-month sales tax holiday and claimed it wasn’t doing enough to support small businesses, which he called “the load-bearing pillars of our economy.”
In pointing to Nejatian as the example that the rest of “corporate Canada” should emulate, Poilievre was clear: if executives want to curry favour with his future government, they need to start speaking out against the current one.
Poilievre is likely taking cues from similar dynamics down south, where the tech industry has openly embraced the political right in the U.S.
When Elon Musk makes a post criticizing the prime minister or the Canadian government, it gets ample media coverage. But when our home-grown tech executives echo extreme right-wing talking points and make it clear they’ll support any political project that results in lower taxes and fewer regulations on their operations, most journalists are far less interested.
In recent decades, the tech industry benefited from the notion that technology was inherently progressive. But tech executives’ embrace of right-wing political movements on either side of the border shows that’s hardly guaranteed.
There may also be a more personal reason Shopify is in Poilievre’s good books, however.
In October, Poilievre’s wife Anaida co-launched an organization called Lead Her Forward to hold networking events across the country for women trying to get ahead in their careers.
The group’s future events will be held in Shopify’s “beautiful office space” in Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa, which they “gracefully agreed” to provide to the organization, Anaida explained in an interview with the Women Don’t Do That podcast.
Shopify, she said, has a “beautiful platform” that can allow a single mom to “do something like drop shipping and get into ecommerce,” even if they don’t have money to invest.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the tech industry is pushing government policy toward austerity and deregulation, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump reelected.
In recent years, tech companies have faced growing regulatory pressure and the threat of being broken up over their rule-breaking and monopolistic practices. They want that to end, and the Republicans have promised to accede to their demands. But you can be certain those efforts won’t remain confined to our southern neighbour.
In Canada, a corporate executive can’t just spend hundreds of millions of dollars to back a political party, which is why we may be seeing more novel forms of influence at work.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be on guard as Shopify executives seem to be at the forefront of a campaign to try to bring a similar agenda up north—and are working to realize it with arguably the most radical form of the Conservative Party the country has seen in years.
In November, a Twitter account called Tablesalt found a project in Africa it didn’t like that was funded by the Canadian government. After tagging Elon Musk, the account declared, “Canada needs DOGE,” a reference to the Department of Government Efficiency the billionaire is heading.
It was retweeted by none other than Lütke.