In a WhatsApp group named Build Canada, some of the country’s most prominent technology leaders, including Shopify executives Tobi Lütke, Daniel Debow and Kaz Nejatian, as well as investor John Ruffolo, are developing a vision for where they think the country should go next. 

The group started as a forum for innovation-sector leaders concerned about Canada’s trajectory to discuss ways to improve the country, two sources with first-hand knowledge of the initiative told The Logic. Tech industry figures in the chat hope to collaborate to generate policy ideas for the next federal government.

Interviews with prominent tech leaders, as well as political lobbying and fundraising records, show a shift in support from the Liberal party to the Conservatives. Canada’s innovation community had worked closely with current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government when they were first elected in 2015, advising them on policy and donating to the party. But after nine years with Liberals in power, many in the tech sector are disillusioned by what they perceive as unmet expectations and a lack of support for entrepreneurs and innovation.

The Build Canada WhatsApp group, while not affiliated with the Conservatives, is just one of a number of signals that the country’s technology industry is ready for a change in Ottawa. 

None of the group members agreed to speak on the record about Build Canada’s purpose or their role within it. But one source stressed that, with an election looming, they have little time to waste if they hope to formalize the initiative. Debow, a vice-president of product at Shopify, told the group he is taking a leave of absence from the commerce firm, during which time he will work on the project, the sources said. In an email to The Logic in early January, Debow said he was not “leading anything,” appending a winking emoticon. He later updated his LinkedIn to indicate he is on leave from Shopify. Reached by phone, he declined to comment, saying “I don’t really want to talk to you about it.”  

While the members of the Build Canada WhatsApp group are saying little, elsewhere Canada’s tech sector and the Conservative party have gone public with their commitment to each other, frequently singing each others’ praises on social media. 

Trudeau’s resignation has done little to quell the technology industry’s concerns about the Liberal government’s handling of the economy. Nor have reports that former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who’s running to replace Trudeau, would reverse the government policy tech leaders most malign. The industry’s most vocal leaders are, it seems, intent on change and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has embraced their support. 

The alliance echoes what’s happening in the U.S. between the second Donald Trump administration and Silicon Valley tech billionaires, who had traditionally supported the Democrats. In Canada, tech leaders hope a change of government in Ottawa will bring a second chance at building a more competitive innovation sector. For the Conservatives, the alliance gives them access to a vocal and well-capitalized community that’s motivated to fix what it sees as the country’s most vexing problems.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen more energy and optimism,” says Boris Wertz, founder and general partner at Vancouver-based venture capital firm Version One Ventures. “There’s so much chatter among entrepreneurs, founders, builders and investors about helping a new government.”

---

Tech leaders were similarly optimistic 10 years ago when the current Liberal government was first elected. In 2015, the sector celebrated Trudeau’s win after nearly a decade of Conservative rule under Stephen Harper, who had alienated the tech community with policies widely viewed to have stifled science and research. 

While the Liberal party didn’t explicitly run on an innovation-focused platform, it sent early signals to the industry that it was serious about supporting it. Trudeau’s government promptly rebranded Industry Canada as Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and tech leaders were encouraged by an apparent willingness to set an ambitious innovation agenda that would address concerns about access to capital, talent and customers. 

Navdeep Bains, innovation minister at the time, said his goal was to create the conditions to spawn another “10 Shopifys.” “I was super excited that they were listening,” says Wertz.  

The 2017 budget solidified the Liberals as a pro-innovation party, with the government going so far as to say that “the future success of all Canadians” relied on it. In the budget, the government announced the Economic Strategy Tables, industry-led groups of about 100 private-sector members, tasked with advising the government on how to grow seven key sectors, including digital industries, manufacturing, cleantech and bioscience. 

Wertz, who contributed to the digital industries group chaired by Shopify’s Lütke, was initially optimistic about the exercise. He flew from Vancouver to Ottawa five or six times over a period of about 10 months for day-long meetings alongside other industry leaders, contributing a tremendous amount of work, he says, to produce an innovation blueprint for the government. 

Among the group’s recommendations, published in September 2018, was creating generous tax incentives to encourage entrepreneurship; establishing technology-adoption centres to make it easier to connect investors with companies and ultimately to paying customers; improving digital infrastructure; and eliminating redundant regulations. 

More than six years later, few of the ideas have been implemented. “I don’t know what happened to that,” says Armen Bakirtzian, CEO of Kitchener, Ont.-based Intellijoint Surgical, who contributed to the report for the health and bioscience sector. “We were assured early on that this is not just an effort of creating a recommendation that’s going to get shelved, and that’s kind of what happened.” 

“I think the Liberals, when they first got in, had a lot of really good promise and really tried to talk positively about supporting the technology sector,” says Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI). But, he says, “the policies that they’ve tried to launch, candidly, have failed.”

The Liberals have followed through on some of their innovation policies. They’ve completed two rounds of the Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative, which helps increase funding for startups, and recently pledged $1 billion for a third. Ottawa has also backed a patent collective for cleantech and programs like the $90-million ElevateIP to help startups secure and maintain their intellectual property rights.

An “exhaustive” list of failures, as Bergen describes it, overshadows those wins. He points to the creation of superclusters, designed to create thousands of jobs, that were ultimately downgraded to just “clusters.” He also cites the Canada Innovation Corporation, which was supposed to fix Canada’s poor productivity and tech adoption performance, but hasn’t seen the light of day. 

Other tech leaders who spoke to The Logic said they were frustrated by the sluggish roll-out of the open banking system, first explored in February 2018 and now, after several delays, due to launch in early 2026. 

Many tech founders have also been frustrated by the long wait for the Liberals to update the scientific research and experimental development (SR&ED) tax incentive, which it first promised to review in the spring 2017 budget. Ottawa announced changes last month, but has yet to unveil plans for a proposed patent box that would encourage firms to hold intellectual property in Canada. The Liberals have also failed to move forward with 2021 election promises to form a new Council of Economic Advisors or a digital policy task force to provide input to the federal fiscal and technology agenda. 

“So many of the policies that we were trying to get done were promised,” Ruffolo says of the Liberals’ innovation commitments. “But, at the end of the day, we were kind of hoodwinked.”

Last June, Ruffolo gathered 86 business leaders at the TD Centre in Toronto’s financial district to hear Poilievre tell them why he should be Canada’s next prime minister. 

Tech executives were well represented in the room. Attendees—of whom men outnumbered women roughly seven to one—included Magnet Forensics CEO Adam Belsher, Borrowell CEO Andrew Graham, Xanadu CEO Christian Weedbrook, ApplyBoard CEO Meti Basiri and Ada CEO Mike Murchison. They all listened as Poilievre set out his vision for Canada. Each paid up to $1,725 to attend.

Before the gathering, it wasn’t clear if the country’s tech sector would back Poilievre. A fair number of the guests, many of whom had previously supported the Liberal Party, were on the fence about how to vote in the next federal election, Ruffolo says. “By that time, the tech community was done with the Liberals,” he explains. “But they didn’t know where to go.” 

Ruffolo, who had made up his own mind months earlier, urged his guests to hear Poilievre out. One attendee, who asked not to be named, said he was impressed by Poilievre’s willingness to stand his ground—including on claims that CEOs have rolled over while Trudeau hiked their taxes. “He won’t deviate from his morals, which I appreciate,” said the guest, who runs a tech scale-up. Poilievre’s comments on keeping and growing companies in Canada also resonated with the entrepreneur.  

By the end of the night, Ruffolo had little doubt Poilievre had the sector’s vote.  

Ruffolo’s own donation records track the tech sector’s shift to the right. According to Elections Canada, Ruffolo last donated to the Liberals in 2021, after 15 years of exclusively giving to the party or its members. In April 2022—five months before Poilievre was elected Conservative Party leader—Ruffolo made donations to the soon-to-be leader and his party, where his political contributions have been flowing since. 

Ruffolo says he can’t recall what prompted his Conservative donations in 2022. “The only purposeful intention really started in 2024 after the capital gains fiasco,” he says of his contributions.

Elections Canada filings also show a growing group of technology investors and executives have sought face time with Poilievre and his key lieutenants. Several attended ticketed fundraising events for the Conservative leader in 2024, including Sagard CEO Paul Desmarais III, DataStealth executive chairman Michael Hyatt, Intrepid Growth Partners co-founder Mark Shulgan, Noble co-founder Jelena Djuric, Version One Ventures’ Wertz, Impression Ventures managing partner Christian Lassonde, and Stingray CEO Eric Boyko. 

Support for the Conservatives follows a change in fortunes for tech companies and their investors. Canada’s technology sector had enjoyed a historic two-year run leading up to 2022, with near-zero per cent interest rates driving a record US$14 billion in venture capital into Canadian tech companies in 2021. 

In 2022, things changed fast. Rising interest rates, soaring inflation and an increasingly tense geopolitical environment prompted the biggest annual drop in the U.S. stock market since the 2008 financial crisis, with tech stocks driving many of the losses. Startups struggled to raise money as investors conserved cash to weather the storm. The number of active businesses dropped, despite Canada’s population soaring. Housing affordability worsened, as did access to health care. Productivity plunged. 

Across Canada, people blamed Trudeau and his government for the economic troubles. Then, in April 2024, many in the tech sector joined the chorus calling for Trudeau and the Liberals to go.

The volte-face was in response to the spring budget, where the government announced it would hike the taxable amount of capital gains—the earnings from selling assets like shares, bonds, real estate and companies. The move would only affect the richest Canadians, representing less than one per cent of the population, the government said. In exchange, Ottawa would collect an additional $19.4 billion in taxes over five years to feed back into services like housing and health care. 

The tech sector was livid. Its leaders criticized the policy as an attack on entrepreneurs, including small-business owners and their families, who, they argued, worked tirelessly for the chance at a big payday from a once-in-a-lifetime sale. Critics warned the tax change would trigger an exodus of Canada’s brightest talent and companies, and freeze investment in the country. “The decision to move on capital gains is a signal that entrepreneurship and risk-taking is not valued,” Kim Furlong, CEO of the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, told The Logic at the time. 

In May, Lütke compared the policy to that of taxing cigarettes to discourage smoking. By the same logic, he said, a capital gains tax would deter people from starting and selling businesses, or investing in them. “To tax innovation, you’ll see the same thing,” he said. 

For many, the tax policy was the final straw. “At some stage, the sum of all these smaller decisions that you don’t agree with kind of bubbles over,” says Wertz. 

---

While the Canadian tech community became increasingly disenchanted with the Liberals, a parallel shift was happening south of the border. 

After an overwhelming show of support for Democratic candidates in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, tech executives—including venture capitalist David Sacks, Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk and Andreessen Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz—began donating huge sums to get Donald Trump elected. The sector is now well represented in the new president’s administration, with officials coming from PayPal, Palantir, ScaleAI, SpaceX and Andreessen Horowitz. Musk, while not a government employee, will co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.  

The relationship between Silicon Valley and the Republicans has seemingly galvanized Canada’s tech leaders. Some of them have adopted the language of their American counterparts, with calls for Canada’s own DOGE, and attacks on “wokeness” as a symbol of the left’s apparent failures. Some of Trump’s staunchest supporters from the tech sector—including Musk and Andreessen—have weighed in on Canada’s politics, with praise for Poilievre and ridicule for Trudeau. 

“So many people got inspired by the vibe shift in the U.S., and feeling like there’s a serious alternative that can create the same thing for Canada,” says Wertz. 

Rick Perkins, the Conservatives’ innovation critic, began to get a sense of the discontent in the tech sector well before Silicon Valley’s right turn or the Liberals’ capital gains announcement. Rather, it started when he began asking companies for feedback on the government’s now-defunct AI legislation, Bill C-27. “They’d come into the office and then we’d talk about C-27, but we’d talk about everything else that was going on,” Perkins says.

What followed was a campaign to meet with representatives from Canadian tech companies to ask them what a Conservative government should do to make the economy more productive, he says. 

“I’ve been having the meetings. Pierre [Poilievre] has had a lot of meetings with them—probably more than even I’ve had,” Perkins says. Melissa Lantsman, the Conservative’s co-deputy leader, and national revenue critic Adam Chambers have also been part of the outreach effort.

Lobbying records show Lantsman met last year with representatives from open banking proponent Questrade Financial, right-wing video platform Rumble and innovation cluster Next Generation Manufacturing Canada. Perkins has heard from fintech firm Wealthsimple, generative AI startup Cohere, Fintechs Canada, crypto startup Shakepay and the Digital innovation cluster. Chambers’s list of contacts includes HR software developer Humi, accounting scale-up FreshBooks, bank-backed data firm Symcor and carbon-capture startup Deep Sky. 

Poilievre takes relatively few lobbying meetings—he’s called government relations professionals “utterly useless” and said businesses will have to convince everyday Canadians to back their policy proposals before a Conservative government will implement them. But he was in contact with Shopify executives in February and December last year, according to the federal lobbying registry. In a tweet last month, Poilievre praised Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and COO Kaz Nejatian for having “the backbone to stand up and fight for all entrepreneurs,” suggesting corporate Canada “learn from them in every way.”

All those conversations have helped shape the Conservatives’ approach as they prepare for an upcoming election, says Perkins.

The Conservatives’ innovation policy ideas at this point aren’t very detailed—at least publicly. Perkins wouldn’t say what will be in the platform, but should the party form the next government, he believes it would move away from subsidies as Ottawa’s main form of support and instead reform the tax code to incentivize innovation and investment, and ensure intellectual property stays in Canada. 

“With what the Conservatives are proposing,” says Bergen, “I think if they’re done correctly, there’s a real shot here for this country to have a chance at being able to build an innovation economy that can rival any in the world.” 

---

Intellijoint’s Bakirtzian was pleasantly surprised when Poilievre took him up on an invitation to tour his Kitchener, Ont., office last fall—something he says Trudeau has never done. Bakirtzian says he invited leaders from across Kitchener-Waterloo, a hot spot for tech talent and startups, to participate in the meeting with Poilievre. The group spent over an hour discussing their problems and suggesting how the government could help solve them, he says. 

“He was open to listening to what we had to say and to what our challenges were,” says Bakirtzian, adding that he was encouraged by Poilievre’s willingness to collaborate on policy ideas rather than prescribe solutions for what ails the industry. “It was just a refreshing change,” he says. 

The meeting followed a similar one in Toronto last May where Xanadu hosted Lantsman for a tour and discussion that included CCI’s Bergen and executives from scale-ups Borrowell, Canvass AI, D2L, Peraso and Viral Nation. 

Thomas Park, former partner at BDC Capital, agrees that the innovation sector has lost confidence in the government as a reliable partner. “That trust needs to be rebuilt,” he says. But he cautioned against dismantling the current innovation agenda completely. “My concern is everybody’s so frustrated that we’re going to tear everything down, but don’t actually have an alternative solution aside from high-level talking points,” he says. 

Bakirtzian and others who spoke to The Logic acknowledged that a potential Conservative government may end up disappointing them, just as the Liberals have. But the potential that the sector will fare better under Poilievre’s leadership is a gamble he said is worth taking. 

“We want innovation policy that actually works and the current Liberal government has not given us that,” says Bakirtzian. “The natural reaction is to change, and the change is to a government that, in our eyes, is saying the right things. The proof will be in the pudding.”