Tech CEOs are suddenly interested in stealing your vote. It’s no surprise.

This week, Tobias Lütke, the CEO of Shopify and one of Canada’s wealthiest residents with an estimated net worth of around $16.35 billion, endorsed oligarchy.

That may sound dramatic, but there’s no other way to describe Lütke’s multi-day posting spree, which started off by suggesting that retirees on pensions should have their voting rights revoked. He then co-signed an idea from his comment section suggesting that the wealthy should get extra votes while the poorest people in Canada shouldn’t be able to vote at all, and further specified that wealthy Canadians like him should get 5 votes. He finally topped it off by making it clear that he doesn’t know the difference between income taxes and sales taxes, which throws the idea he deserves extra votes into question, before spending some time making sarcastic comments about how Canadians weren’t that nice when he suggested they should lose their voting rights, and that everyone who told him that was a bad idea was envious.

If you thought that takes like this were isolated to just Lütke, you would be wrong. Over the past several days, the CEO of Build Canada, a policy forum for entrepreneurs and other wealthy Canadians, defended him as a brave thinker for suggesting the elderly and the poor should be forced to cede their votes to him. A board member for Loblaws (as well as Build Canada) suggested he was well-reasoned. A co-founder of SKIP claimed that people were trying to tear Lütke down and that his plan was within the bounds of normal political discourse and not a massive violation of human rights. Multiple board members of Shopify voiced similar defenses, and Elon Musk referred to him as “a national treasure of Canada”.

It is, unfortunately, not a surprise that so many high-net-worth Canadians are willing to defend the degradation of democracy. It’s the formalization of a power-grab that has been going on behind the scenes. As the wealthy gap between the ultra-rich  and everyone else grows, so does the power gap. The ultra-wealthy are able to do things like fund think-tanks whose research always seems to find that the best interests of the uber-wealthy are exactly what the Canadian economy needs. They can pay lobbying and public relations firms or buy media outlets to help make those policy proposals a reality. They get direct access to government leaders at high dollar fundraisers, charity events, and other venues where corporate and political leaders rub elbows. Many of them even hold levers of power to manipulate prices on things like groceries, energy, and housing that impact the cost-of-living and can be manipulated to support their preferred election outcomes.

I know that for a fact, because I am paid to advocate for a set of high-net-worth Canadians: Patriotic Millionaires Canada. The difference is, the wealthy Canadians I represent are fighting for a Canadian tax system that doesn’t give free handouts in the tax code to the ultra-wealthy. Our members advocate to tax the super-rich, including changes Lütke, along with Shopify President Harvey Finkelstein, recently publicly fought against, and were successful despite majority support among voters. 

With his plan to change the voting system, Lütke is really just saying the quiet part out loud. 

Our leaders have been beholden to the idea, promoted by many of his defenders this week, that people like Lütke are “job creators”. The reality is, Lütke owes all of his success in no small part to the Canadian taxpayer. We’re who funded the education system that supplied Shopify’s workforce, the healthcare system that made sure they were able to keep working, and the tech infrastructure that the business was built on the back of. We’re the consumers and small business owners that used Shopify’s product, we created the physical infrastructure that moves everything sold through Shopify, and we’re the workforce that built Shopify and every business that uses it. 

So government leaders have a choice: Do they want to side with undemocratic billionaires who explicitly believe they should have a bigger say in our country than their fellow citizens? Or do they want to say it’s time to pay us back, and create a tax code that does just that? 

Dylan Dusseault is the Executive Director of Patriotic Millionaires Canada