Looking down south at the state of American politics, you wouldn’t think there is much Canadians would want to emulate. Yet an increasingly vocal faction of Canada’s tech sector seems to think that what Canada really needs in its next government is a cost-cutting, budget-slashing, job-killing efficiency agency: A Canadian DOGE.
DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—is the agency led by Elon Musk that has taken a hatchet to multiple government agencies, in the search of “efficiencies.”
The incompetence of DOGE is already the stuff of legend: 300 nuclear regulatory workers fired, only to be re-hired once their essential role in nuclear security was recognized. However, re-hiring proved difficult, as DOGE had terminated the fired employees’ email and cell phone access.
Then there is the admission that DOGE shut down USAID’s Ebola prevention program, only to restore it days later—although critics still say the program is suspended.
And then there is the long list of supposed savings DOGE publicly promoted, only to be profoundly inaccurate upon later scrutiny.
DOGE has now set its sights on the Social Security Administration, reportedly causing chaos within that vital American social program.
Despite this track record, a select group of Canadian tech executives believe DOGE is something we should be replicating here in Canada.
Build Canada is a platform launched by 27 of Canada’s tech-bro heavyweights, including Shopify’s Daniel Debow, KOHO Financial Inc. founder and CEO Daniel Eberhard, and Cohere Inc. co-founder and CTO Ivan Zhang. It promises to share ideas from Canadian entrepreneurs for a “bolder, richer, freer country.”
While many of Build Canada’s policy proposals seem utterly self-serving, like deregulating delivery robots and digitizing Canadian’s health data, others are patent replicas of DOGE.
In particular, there is the call to eliminate 110,000 federal civil service jobs as well as the introduction of AI into public administration to further automate the federal civil service (and potentially supply the tech industry with a vast treasure trove of public data).
Build Canada has also created a sister website, called “Canada Spends”, that looks like a virtual photo-negative of the U.S. DOGE website, highlighting what it considers to be wasteful and reckless spending by the federal government.
While Build Canada spokesperson and former Shopify executive Daniel Debow has tried to push back on any comparisons between Build Canada’s vision and DOGE—given the disastrous impact of that agency in the United States—many Build Canada supporters praised the DOGE initiative when first introduced.
Build Canada supporters are particularly enamoured with the example of former Prime Minister Paul Martin’s infamous 1995 budget, in which he cut transfers and social spending so deeply that we are still living with the repercussions today.
Despite all the talk of innovation and prosperity that Build Canada and its supporters dress up their proposals with, what they are advocating for is bog-standard neoliberalism.
Tax cuts for themselves.
Spending and job cuts for the rest of us.
Industry-wide deregulation, along with a healthy dose of state subsidies for the tech sector.
Since we are in a federal election, it’s worth noting that, as The Logic reports, Canada’s tech leaders, including many of the supporters of Build Canada, are disappointed with the speed of change under the Liberals and “are throwing their support behind the Conservatives and their leader Pierre Poilievre, hosting fundraisers and suggesting policy ideas for the party.”
Even if the Conservatives were to form the next federal government, creating a Canadian equivalent of DOGE would in no way be a slam dunk.
There are points of resistance that would make a Canadian DOGE a much more difficult sell here. The first is the legacy of DOGE and the rank incompetence it has shown since Donald Trump became America’s president.
Indeed, within the United States itself, the agency is facing increased public anger. A Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 per cent of surveyed U.S. adults are not supportive of the advisory board’s handling of workers employed with the federal government. So it is not clear that even Americans will support this chaotic cost-cutting exercise when all is said and done.
The very idea of a Canadian DOGE might be radioactive by the time a similar agency were to be introduced here.
The second is that Canadians tend to be more aware of government programs because they have direct experience with provision from the government through public social programs like universal public health care, $10-a-day child care, the child tax benefit, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), Old Age Security (OAS), and more.
Much of government activity in the U.S. is invisible to the public. It’s what Suzanne Metzler calls the “submerged state.” Americans often have no direct contact with the government because social policy is often directed through the private sector or other actors.
Hence the famous Tea Party placard that urged “Government to get their damn hands off my medicare.”
Even when Americans are directly receiving government benefits, they don’t necessarily know it.
Metzler argues that this ignorance of government activities in citizens’ lives contributes to Americans’ distrust and suspicion of government writ large. They simply don’t see how the government benefits them.
It is far easier for an agency like DOGE to operate in such an environment, where the public largely believes that no amount of cuts will directly affect them.
Lastly, Canada’s tech sector is in no way as powerful as the U.S., so its influence on government will be more muted—at least initially.
But as we can see from Build Canada, the tech sector is trying to increase their influence over public policy, taking a page out of their U.S. brethren’s handbook.
Despite not having the same kind of political and economic clout that American tech has, they do have a lot of cultural capital. Insofar as politicians and the media continue to uncritically venerate them as innovators, disruptors, and wealth creators, they will get the ear of decision-makers and they will promote their agenda, regardless of who forms the next government.
That makes it all the more important that their vision for the country is seen for what it is: self-interested neoliberalism cloaked in tech-speech that will not serve the broader public interest.
