Shopify's CEO just suggested poor people shouldn't have the right to vote. He's also influencing our politics.

The multi-billionaire CEO of Shopify thinks a “good system” is one where the poor don’t get to vote in elections and the rich get to vote several times over.

I wish I was kidding.

Not only that, but moments before endorsing this idea, the e-commerce giant’s top executive, Tobi Lutke, also suggested that anyone receiving a “locked in and guaranteed” pension is now “a dependent” and “that means no voting.”

He’s just itching to disenfranchise people, huh?

Another Twitter user responded to Lutke’s suggestion that we strip seniors of their right to vote, expanding the the idea with a cursed “yes, and.” Eric Thor, a retired former banking VP at TD, suggested the idea of “weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay.”

Lutke supported the idea, calling it a “good system.”

While it might seem silly to waste my breath talking about the anti-democratic daydreams of a multi-billionaire, there’s a very good reason I want to talk about this: because this Shopify executive has been trying to influence Canadian policy.

As myself and several other non-mainstream journalists have documented in recent years, Canada’s tech bros have been trying to throw their ideological weight around in our politics.

Despite our efforts to shine a light on this, it’s barely registered as a blip in mainstream media coverage. In fact, even as Lutke went viral for his suggestion that poor people shouldn’t have the right to vote, major outlets — including CBC News, CTV News, Global News and The Globe and Mail — didn’t appear to touch the story. I searched their websites for mentions of the word “Shopify,” and I couldn’t find even a short writeup of one of the richest men in the country’s antidemocratic idea.

But hey, at least 6ixBuzz was on it.

So, once again, allow me to tell you why we should be talking about this.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat. The idea Lutke promoted, in which people wouldn’t have the right to vote unless they pay income tax, is horrific.

It means people who, for example, can’t work due to a disability, people who are low income and end up not paying income taxes due to other offsets and benefits, stay at home parents, and so many other Canadians wouldn’t have a say in their own democracy.

Not to mention that they appeared to base the idea on the dollar amount paid, not on the actual percentage of a person’s income. Like, a $100,000 tax bill for someone like Lutke, who has $10 billion in net worth, is equivalent to $10 tax bill for someone with a $100,000 net worth. That means the rich would get more votes despite feeling significantly less of a financial hit from their larger dollar figure tax bills.

I reached out to an economics professor, Andrew Leach, to ask someone with economic expertise about the unhinged idea — and he explained that he’s “not prepared to engage” in a discussion about the economic implications here, because it would ignore a “much more fundamental reality.”

“When you’re talking about disenfranchising millions of Canadians and giving others extra votes, that’s unconstitutional. Full stop,” Leach said.

Emmett Macfarlane, a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, had the right kind of expertise to speak to that element — and he told me it’s an idea “entirely contrary to basic democratic fairness and equality.”

“It should go without saying that such an idea, if implemented, clearly runs afoul of the constitution,” he told me.

“Indeed, the courts would strike it down in a heartbeat.”

In fact, even the clause that provinces have been increasingly abusing to trample on charter rights — the notwithstanding clause — wouldn’t be applicable here, Macfarlane said, because the idea “violates principles at the heart of democratic voting rights under the Charter, and the principle of one person, one vote.”

“As a political matter, it should go without saying that this idea belongs in the anti-democratic trash heap next to limiting the right to vote exclusively to landowners or men,” Macfarlane said.

Today’s post was just one in a long line of some off-colour things Lütke has publicly posted. In 2024, he agreed that Canada needs its own “DOGE,” Elon Musk’s project to slash government spending that instead didn’t save much of anything and cut funding to lifesaving aid. Those cuts are projected to cause over 780,000 deaths.

While his comment about DOGE came before its disastrous impacts, just last month, Lutke called Musk “the best entrepreneur that ever was.”

In fact, when the Globe and Mail ran an op-ed last month with a headline suggesting how to “properly hate” Musk as he became the world’s first trillionaire, Lutke responded by saying “we all clearly don’t hate the media enough.”

He’s posted at length about “woke.” He’s railed against “socialists.” He’s even shared the same infographics as Musk that suggest they aren’t far-right — it’s everyone else who has changed.

Lutke is also, notably, one of the men behind Build Canada, a tech bro-backed effort to influence Canadian politics. I’ve covered this at length, but let me summarize it for you now.

Several Shopify executives, including Lutke, had a WhatsApp group that included other tech leaders, where they’d moan about the direction they thought Canadian policy should be heading in. They called that group chat Build Canada — and eventually, they launched it as a real organization in the hopes of influencing Canadian policy.

On the website, a bunch of primarily middle-aged men who are ultra wealthy get to publish their ideas for potential policies, and other “builders” can endorse their idea. The website’s builder list used to be public, but it’s not anymore.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that I pointed out there were more men named “Michael” on the “Builder” list than there were women?

Anyway, the ultra-wealthy who are spending to support this effort to sway public policy appear to be getting a good return on their investment.

As the Tyee has documented in a series it published about this issue, about 20 of the policies that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has passed have a striking similarity to suggestions from the Build Canada website.

In fact, a spokesperson for Build Canada told Taylor Noakes at DeSmog that Carney’s office “has reached out to Build Canada on occasion to ask about our memos.”

Not only that, but Lutke isn’t the only voice at Shopify who is getting increasingly outspoken with their political views. Shopify President Harley Finkelstein just posted today suggesting that people performing a drag event in support of Palestine are NPCs who “support the current thing.”

Kaz Nejatian, who is no longer at Shopify but was a longtime top executive at the company, is married to Candice Malcolm — a founder of one of Canada’s most prominent right wing “news” outlets, Juno News.

He helped her launch Juno News’ predecessor, True North, and Malcolm told PressProgress’ Luke Lebrun in 2024 that she and Nejatian were “one of the largest donors to True North.”

That’s why it matters when Lutke promotes unhinged ideas.

It sure seems like he and his friends are working hard, using the ample resources at their disposal, to sway Canadian public policy and opinion — and they might be succeeding.