Pierre Poilievre is cozying up to Canada’s far-right broligarchs ⋆ The Breach

He has also praised Trump’s threat to enact 25 per cent tariffs on Canada, stating that the U.S. is “within its rights” to do so. He has retweeted posts calling for social support programs to be cut because “Canada spends billions on illegals, asylum and refugees.” And he’s generally spread right-wing misinformation about the state of Canada and the world.

Lütke’s statements are well at home at Shopify, where he is one of several high-up execs regularly espousing right-wing views. 

Shopify president Harley Finkelstein isn’t as outspoken, but he still frequently criticizes government policy. He was particularly outraged this summer when the Liberals increased the capital gains inclusion rate, which required 0.13 per cent of the richest Canadians to pay a bit more tax. 

Finkelstein called the tax “divisive and political” and argued it would kill business investment in Canada, accusations levied as part of a broader campaign against the tax organized by a tech industry lobby group. 

Company’s COO helped launch far-right media site

The right-wing ringleader among Shopify’s executive leadership appears to be Kaz Nejatian, the company’s vice-president of product and chief operating officer.

Before going into tech, Nejatian was a Conservative political staffer. 

In 2011, when Nejatian worked for then-immigration minister Jason Kenney, he was forced to resign after mistakenly sending out fundraising requests on parliamentary letterhead and accidentally leaking a strategy to target “very ethnic” voters. Two months later, he was invited back as director of communications. 

Nejatian’s right-wing associations became even clearer in 2017, when he and his partner Candice Malcolm, a former columnist at the Toronto Sun, took over a charity called True North and turned it into a right-wing media organization. 

He joined Shopify in 2019, and rose to become its chief operating officer in 2022.

In the years since, True North has become a major player in Canada’s far-right media network, publishing anti-immigrant, transphobic and racist content, and pushing far-right talking points. 

As Nejatian rose through Shopify’s ranks, he and Malcolm were “one of the largest donors to True North,” as Malcolm told PressProgress in July. 

Earlier this year, True North published an interview between one of their main personalities, Harrison Faulkner, and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys—a far-right group that has been designated a terrorist entity in Canada. 

Though the interview was later scrubbed from the True North website, PressProgress reported that it featured Faulkner and McInnes making racist jokes and denigrating immigrants.

Faulkner has a history of engaging with far-right groups and spreading misinformation and extremist talking points, such as falsely connecting Canadian wildfires to arson in a 2023 video for True North. 

Shopify’s right-wing leadership has also influenced the company’s decisions about who and what it will provide its services for. 

In 2017, Lütke published a Medium post entitled “In Support of Free Speech” to justify his decision to provide Shopify services for far-right media group Breitbart.

But Lütke hasn’t let every extremist using his services slide by. In 2018, Shopify banned a number of right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys, from using the platform, took down QAnon merchandise in 2020, and removed Donald Trump’s store in January 2021.

However, when controversy escalated over extremist anti-LGBTQ+ influencer Libs of TikTok and other merchants selling Nazi memorabilia on Shopify in late 2022, the company refused to take action. 

Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Check My Ads, claimed at the time that Shopify employees pointed to Nejatian as the reason for the more extreme approach, even though allowing such sellers went against the company’s Acceptable Use Policy.

Earlier this year, independent journalist Rachel Gilmore reported that Shopify continues to provide services to far-right and extremist groups and individuals, including the Daily Wire, Rebel News, and Alex Jones’ post-InfoWars merch store. 

Gilmore noted that not only had the sale of Nazi-themed items continued, but that Shopify had actually changed its Acceptable Use Policy to remove prohibitions on hate speech and harassment. 

While Shopify wasn’t always so hardline about defending the far right’s use of its platform, the company’s right-wing drift has increasingly become official corporate policy. 

Big tech trying to muscle in on policy

When Poilievre praised Shopify in December, his post built on one made by Nejatian complaining about the government’s GST/HST tax break and how it would inevitably harm the “very businesses our country relies on.” 

The Shopify COO’s tweet criticized the government for its two-month sales tax holiday and claimed it wasn’t doing enough to support small businesses, which he called “the load-bearing pillars of our economy.”

In pointing to Nejatian as the example that the rest of “corporate Canada” should emulate, Poilievre was clear: if executives want to curry favor with his future government, they need to start speaking out against the current one. 

Poilievre is likely taking cues from similar dynamics down south, where the tech industry has openly embraced the political right in the U.S. 

When Elon Musk makes a post criticizing the prime minister or the Canadian government, it gets ample media coverage. But when our home-grown tech executives echo extreme right-wing talking points and make it clear they’ll support any political project that results in lower taxes and fewer regulations on their operations, most journalists are far less interested. 

In recent decades, the tech industry benefited from the notion that technology was inherently progressive. But tech executives’ embrace of right-wing political movements on either side of the border shows that’s hardly guaranteed.

There may also be a more personal reason Shopify is in Poilievre’s good books, however. 

In October, Poilievre’s wife Anaida co-launched an organization called Lead Her Forward to hold networking events across the country for women trying to get ahead in their careers. 

The group’s future events will be held in Shopify’s “beautiful office space” in Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa, which they “gracefully agreed” to provide to the organization, Anaida explained in an interview with the Women Don’t Do That podcast.

Shopify, she said, has a “beautiful platform” that can allow a single mom to “do something like drop shipping and get into ecommerce,” even if they don’t have money to invest.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the tech industry is pushing government policy toward austerity and deregulation, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump reelected. 

In recent years, tech companies have faced growing regulatory pressure and the threat of being broken up over their rule-breaking and monopolistic practices. They want that to end, and the Republicans have promised to accede to their demands. But you can be certain those efforts won’t remain confined to our southern neighbour.

In Canada, a corporate executive can’t just spend hundreds of millions of dollars to back a political party, which is why we may be seeing more novel forms of influence at work. 

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be on guard as Shopify executives seem to be at the forefront of a campaign to try to bring a similar agenda up north—and are working to realize it with arguably the most radical form of the Conservative Party the country has seen in years.

In November, a Twitter account called Tablesalt found a project in Africa it didn’t like that was funded by the Canadian government. After tagging Elon Musk, the account declared, “Canada needs DOGE,” a reference to the Department of Government Efficiency the billionaire is heading. 

It was retweeted by none other than Lütke.

What are people saying about The Breach?

“It’s about getting to the bottom of things. It’s about unveiling who has the power and what they’re doing with that power.”
Linda McQuaig, journalist and author

As a non-profit, free from powerful corporate interests, we invest in investigations and uncover the cover-ups. Sustain our journalism for transformation.