A spokesperson for Build Canada and Canada Spends says the effort to influence government policy and raise awareness of public spending is not trying to emulate billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial DOGE initiative in the United States.
Daniel Debow spoke to The Tyee following the publication of an earlier story in February that pointed out that several of the supporters of Build Canada had praised Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and called for the adoption of a similar initiative in Canada.
The story also noted that the Canada Spends website shared similar formatting and content as the DOGE.gov site, notably the use of government spending facts in boxes that link to posts on X, the social media platform Musk owns.
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As usual they’re our version of it. Canada seems to always be a few years behind American garbage like this and it’s essentially what was palatable for America 2020ish.
Although there’s this:
Some of Build Canada’s supporters have also expressed interest in the ideas of Balaji Srinivasan, a tech entrepreneur who has become a proponent of an idea called the “network state.” Parrish interviewed Srinivasan twice on his podcast The Knowledge Project, once in 2020 and once in 2022. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and COO Kaz Nejatian were guests on the second episode of Srinivasan’s The Network State podcast in 2023. On that episode, Srinivasan suggested that Shopify had grown to have “a country-sized economy.”
The idea behind the network state is that companies could operate and govern city states.
Good on the Tyee for making sure not to silence the other side of the story.
But fuck that group of rich assholes trying to establish a DOGE in Canada but being butthurt Musk ruined the concept before they got a chance to do it.
The two lobby groups (Build Canada and Canada Spends) are quite different from each other and completely different from DOGE (the former United States Digital Service). It’s like comparing Habitat for Humanity to the CMHC or something. If I met someone who thought that these things were “all the same”, I’d assume they’re pretty basic and one of those Canadians who watches too much US news. Like here is Build Canada advocating for Building rental housing stock and High Speed Rail We are luckily to live in a different country with our own lobby groups, government structures and problems. We can actually make decisions about what we think of them based on better information than if we think they’re like some weird government department that a billionaire in a neighbouring country hijacked.