The year Canadian tech got political (again)

BetaKit is ending the year with a look back at the biggest tech stories of 2025. You can read the full series here.

At the start of 2025, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were a sinking ship after a messy end to 2024. As BetaKit noted in January, though we are not a political publication, we do track where politics intersects with tech. Throughout 2025, those intersections were frequent and hard to ignore.

For some in Canadian tech, the final nail in the coffin was the proposed increase to the capital gains tax rate, an increase that more than 2,000 leaders called “disastrous.” But the end of Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister also marked the completion of a decade’s worth of failed innovation policy.

By March, the Liberals were under new leadership, and the tax policy that had enraged so many was dead on arrival. “I am a pragmatist above all,” Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney said at the time. “So, when I see that something’s not working, I will change it.”

It was a signal to many tech leaders that Trudeau’s successor was listening ahead of the looming federal election, and not the only one. Carney quickly borrowed the ‘Build Canada’ moniker of a new tech-founded advocacy group for a variety of flagship policies.

To outsiders, it may have seemed as if Canada’s tech elite had suddenly gotten very cozy with Ottawa. But 2025 wasn’t the first year Canadian tech has organized for influence; the year was the restart of a cycle that last ran almost a decade prior. While history doesn’t repeat, it can rhyme.

“Used for leverage.”

Much has been made of Carney’s Liberals engaging with tech this year. They’re working with Shopify leaders on SR&ED reform! Federal ministers want to champion tech companies like Cohere! Every new policy is Build Canada something—even the rebranded federal interchange program designed to engage “external leaders” from tech and business into the public service.

For those who were in tech or politics at the time, it sounded very much like the beginning of Trudeau’s Liberal government, when Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke was chairing a federally-backed digital industries policy group. Or talking with the prime minister about Canadian ambition and swagger. Or sitting on stage with Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains as he told the audience that Canada needs “10 Shopifys, 20 Shopifys, 30 Shopifys.”

“We should not be seeking the government to lead us. That’s a big mistake. The government should be used for leverage.”
John Ruffolo
CCI Vice-chair

Tall poppies in business and tech will always be a popular target for any incoming government with innovation as part of its mandate. If we go back a bit further, we can see additional parallels in how Canadian tech engaged in politics, and what has changed.

By 2015, Canadian investment in research and development, and technology in general, had been lagging behind global peers for years under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His government faced criticism for restrictions and cuts to the budget for scientific research, stunting innovation.

Tech leaders responded by forming an industry group called the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) to help shape national innovation policy. CCI founding member John Ruffolo, alongside former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie, advocated for a business council that would speak for the startup ecosystem with “a single voice.”

In an interview with BetaKit shortly after, Ruffolo was explicit on the value of such a voice. “It should always be the private sector leading this stuff; we should not be seeking the government to lead us,” he said. “That’s a big mistake. The government should be used for leverage.”

CCI was quickly able to successfully lobby the new Liberal government to claw back a campaign commitment to increase taxes on stock options. A year later, a Trump-led White House was imposing tariffs on Canada and forcing new trade pathways. Sound familiar?

Cacophony

In 2025, Canadian tech evolved beyond the single voice Ruffolo advocated for in 2015.

Take Build Canada, which has published 47 policy memos so far, all from prominent Canadian tech figures, in the interest of ambitious national growth. Despite not being a registered lobbyist group, Build Canada CEO Lucy Hargreaves told BetaKit at SAAS NORTH in November that government officials regularly call her to connect with the authors.

The direct line of connection, and perhaps the urgency of the national moment, has led the feedback from tech to be louder, and more explicit. Canadian tech executives have made it a habit to publicly criticize government policy, with Lütke denouncing both Canada’s approach to retaliatory tariffs and foreign direct investment this year.

#CDNTECH 2025

BetaKit looks back at the defining Canadian tech stories of 2025.

The pushback against tech has also grown louder, as those outside the industry were prompted this year to openly question whether countries should be governed by technocrats. Build Canada’s formation came as US big tech CEOs flanked Trump on inauguration day, and shortly before Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) brought dysfunction and fear to the US civil service. It wasn’t long before Build Canada, which has also advocated for cuts to government spending, was fighting against a DOGE for Canada label.

Political pushback also came from within the Canadian tech industry, which saw intersection points between a US rollback of DEI, concurrent cuts in diversity initiatives from Shopify, and a new political non-profit with strong connections to Canada’s largest tech company (Build Canada co-founder Dan Debow is a former Shopify exec; he is joined on the board by entrepreneur and wife of Tobi Lütke, Fiona McKean; the initial list of 28 Canadian tech supporters listed on Build Canada’s website at launch comprised several current and former Shopify execs, including BetaKit board chair Satish Kanwar).

In February, over 1,000 Canadian tech leaders, investors, and workers signed an open letter stating that the ongoing DEI rollback was the “wrong direction” for Canada, and that unelected business leaders should “not run the government.” It was a moment reminiscent of the 2017 open letter supporting diversity in response to Trump’s “Muslim travel ban,” signed by over 3,000 people, including Lütke and several other Build Canada memo writers. But in 2025, Canadian tech was no longer speaking with a unified voice.

What’s next?

Whatever side of the political spectrum you fall on, it was clear in 2025 that both tech leaders, and technology itself, have become a driving force in Canadian politics. It’s yet to be seen if this ‘leverage’ will help improve Canada’s productivity, sovereignty, or social cohesion.

It is also clear that, so far, the new Liberal leadership has welcomed the tech and business community with open arms. But it looked that way for Trudeau’s Liberals at one point, too. In 2026, BetaKit will be watching what new policies will result from the evolving relationship between industry and government, and if this new relationship will end better than the last.

Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.

Illustration courtesy Madison McLauchlan for BetaKit.