Calvin @caleady

Season 3 of PAW Patrol seems to have taken a dark turn...

Bottom Line: Tobi Lütke supporters are using his company Shopify as a shield to (1) Distract, (2) Deflect, and (3) Defend him from his remarks about abolishing voting rights from low-income people. The issue is not about Shopify, but rather the right to vote. That is the issue.

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57 years ago

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Screeching Tall Poppy Syndrome in response to criticism of @tobi *endorsing the tacit rigging and deforming of democracy* implies there is no possible good-faith criticism of the rich. Which is how you get, say, Elon, who like Poilievre recently called Tobi a national treasure

David Moscrop @David_Moscrop

23 hours ago

It matters what rich and influential people say about democracy in Canada because rich and influential people have outsized power to shape our public policy and institutions.

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Perhaps Shopify should be investing in better comms and exec coaching, because all of the board members and execs screaming on the internet their loyalty to the guy to had an incredibly stupid take, while not caring about the reputational risk of him running his mouth is crazy

DHH @dhh

a day ago

Board member here. Tobi is the sole seeding reason that there is a Shopify, that it has prospered beyond the wildest shareholder imaginations, and that it has its stellar reputation among merchants and customers alike. Our care and appreciation couldn't be greater!

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CEO of Build Canada defends Lutke's rhetoric for stripping poor people of the vote, but says she would rather talk about taking the vote away from the elderly.

Lucy Hargreaves @lucyhargreaves4

2 days ago

this is a ridiculous take the guy has created thousands of jobs in Toronto, sees the incredible potential of the city and country, and is frustrated that people with no stake in the future are the ones showing up and deciding for everyone else. I’m similarly frustrated to say

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I'm a disabled veteran who draws a CAF pension and money from VAC. So under your plan, I got to defend democracy but now I don't get to participate in it because I draw a pension? Bold assertion. And an affront to the Charter.

tobi lutke @tobi

5 days ago

@cafedujord New deal: when you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.

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Wow, Build Canada CEO speaking fairly positively about taking the vote away from elderly people. Interesting times!

Lucy Hargreaves @lucyhargreaves4

2 days ago

this is a ridiculous take the guy has created thousands of jobs in Toronto, sees the incredible potential of the city and country, and is frustrated that people with no stake in the future are the ones showing up and deciding for everyone else. I’m similarly frustrated to say

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The way we are normalizing discourse about taking voting rights - which are protected by THE CHARTER OF RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS - away from people is just absolutely wild. And not acceptable. Regardless of whatever motivation there is. #cdnpoli

Lucy Hargreaves @lucyhargreaves4

2 days ago

this is a ridiculous take the guy has created thousands of jobs in Toronto, sees the incredible potential of the city and country, and is frustrated that people with no stake in the future are the ones showing up and deciding for everyone else. I’m similarly frustrated to say

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Ontario billionaire under fire for arguing poor people shouldn't be able to vote blogto.com/city/2026/07/o…

Mr. Lutke should be rightly condemned for these authoritarian views on democracy, and his frequent pompous directives to governments should be discounted accordingly. But please don't glorify Shopify as one of Canada's 'largest' companies: it isn't remotely. /2

Gil McGowan @gilmcgowan

3 days ago

The CEO of Shopify, one of Canada’s largest corporations, says the poor and the elderly should not be allowed to vote. It’s pretty clear that billionaires are the real problem, not ordinary citizens.

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Seriously useful as well as fascinating website. Confirms everything you’ve been experiencing.

Nick Kapur @nick_kapur

a week ago

This amazing website, called "Worse on Purpose," is cataloguing all the ways companies are deliberately and secretively degrading their own products As usual, in most cases the culprit is private equity extracting enormous sums while everyone else is left worse off.

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"His robotic callousness reflected what Shopify’s one-time head of communications, Darrell Etherington, referred to, in TechCrunch, as Lütke’s 'basic inability to empathize with the situation of many employees under his company’s charge.'"

Aliya Pabani @aliyapabani

10 months ago

Shopify's former head of comms basically called Tobi a sociopath thewalrus.ca/the-death-of-s…

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Here are the screenshots.

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Idk, feels like it should be front-page news that the CEO of Canada’s largest non-banking company thinks that poor people shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Nathaniel Arfin @ArfinNathaniel

4 days ago

Is he doing a bit, or just comically incompatible with democratic values?

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My favorite part of the tech bros is they’re so historically illiterate and ignorant they’re convinced they’re coming up with new innovative ideas. Because they’re just that smart. Rich property owners get votes? Welcome to England…in 1430

So @tobi takes a $1 salary but nets $150M/yr in options, and spent a decade lobbying Ottawa to protect stock-option tax breaks for the benefit of execs. Meanwhile Shopify is upping merchant fees by hundreds to calculate tax while fighting the govt from checking if they were paid.

Rob Silver @RobSilver

4 days ago

My favorite part of the tech bros is they’re so historically illiterate and ignorant they’re convinced they’re coming up with new innovative ideas. Because they’re just that smart. Rich property owners get votes? Welcome to England…in 1430

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Why do people resent the billionaire class and mock the tech bros? This guy would take the vote away from millions of students, fixed income seniors, low income and precarious workers, and give himself extra votes. Build Canada for the Rich.

6ixBuzzTV @6ixbuzztv

4 days ago

Shopify CEO says a “good system” would give 0 votes to those who pay no income tax, while increasing votes for higher taxpayers, capped at 5.

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Fascism. He wants fascism.

6ixBuzzTV @6ixbuzztv

4 days ago

Shopify CEO says a “good system” would give 0 votes to those who pay no income tax, while increasing votes for higher taxpayers, capped at 5.

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As a transit planner I deal with intergenerational conflict constantly. Seniors want the bus to come to their door, but they have time to wait so they don’t mind if it’s infrequent. Their working age kids and grandkids reward the opposite, a longer walk to frequent service. 1/

Romy @Romy_Holland

5 days ago

man i think a central part of aging gracefully is to really understand that the young will inherit the earth and at a certain point your task is to allow them to do so.

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Coyne's column felt like an uncanny rereading of a newsletter I wrote in October 2020 (i'll link to it the replies). I don't know if he's read it or not, but I'd like conservatives to take the argument seriously rather than dismiss it because I made it six years ago, long before Trump 2.0 came along and forced this conversation into the open. I discussed it again in my @WDiminishment essay too, pinned on my profile from a few weeks back. I have been convinced since then that this problem is the biggest ideological/intellectual impediment we have to winning elections at the national level. The last few years have if anything just reinforced and vindicated this belief for me. I called my piece "True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism." The argument was that Canadian conservatism carries a self-loathing streak that curdles, in enough people, into something close to not liking the country much at all. It didn't arrive with MAGA and it won't leave with it either. We need to set that aside if we're actually going to think through this problem and overcome it. Peter Brimelow's book The Patriot Game is the best illustration of it, and the intellectual tome of this strain of anti-nationalism I think. He recast Canadian nationalism as a Liberal manufacturing job (bilingualism, multiculturalism, the flag itself), built by what he called the New Class to entrench its own interests. Say what you like about Brimelow now, that book formed a generation of the Canadian right, Harper included. The movement's response was to import American small-government fusionism wholesale and call it opposition, so Canadian conservatism started sounding, to Canadians, like an American critique of Canada. Harper ran into this problem in 1997 when he told a U.S. audience Canada was a "Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term." Liberals then spent two decades using it to try brand Conservatives as the un-Canadian party. But Harper figured it out eventually. The Royal Navy, the War of 1812 commemorations, the "just visiting" campaign against Ignatieff, was all part of a deliberate effort to reclaim patriotism and not just cede it all to the Liberals, and it helped produce the only Conservative majority since Mulroney. Some Canadian conservatives clearly don't love Canada, and its also part of a reflexive contrarian streak which isn't new, and some online voices sound indistinguishable from MAGA types attacking Canada, because some of them are just recycling MAGA talking points. Coyne's not wrong to be alarmed by that. But the answer was never going to be conservatives shrinking from patriotism because the flag currently feels like it belongs to someone else. Harper already showed the way out of that trap once: go and take the symbols and institutions back and reclaim the mantle of patriotism rather than cede it. That's the project now too. Reclaim the Crown, the parliamentary inheritance, institutions, mythology and love of country, whether or not Liberals built some of the myths around them. Reclaim patriotism as something conservatives are allowed to feel without apologising for it. None of that means pretending Canada has no problems, or that every criticism of Ottawa is secretly disloyal. It means deciding, again, that this is our country too, not America's spare bedroom to grumble about from the outside.

The Globe and Mail @globeandmail

6 days ago

Opinion: Canadian conservatives have a patriotism problem theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…

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