The events south of the border, with the sight of Elon Musk directing not only certain aspects of US government policy, but now bills going through Congress, has a lot of red flags about the influence of tech bros on government. We’re also seeing a number of other tech billionaires “donating” millions of dollars to incoming president Donald Trump’s inauguration, no doubt in an attempt to curry favour, and to obey in advance, but also because they believe that they can exert influence on the incoming Trump administration. Musk’s role of creating “efficiency” in government is going to be a racket that other billionaires and tech bros are going to hope to get in on—an ability to influence rules and regulations in a way that will benefit them and their companies, and enrich themselves even further. There is also the issue of big American companies investing in Bitcoin to curry favour with Trump and his circles. Given how much Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives have a culture of monkey-see-monkey-do when it comes to MAGA and Trump, should we worry about this kind of influence in Canada? Quite likely.

There are definite reverberations from the American culture war here in Canada, most especially among the Conservative caucus, when it comes to the influence Musk has. When you think about the announcement into investments into Telesat a few months ago, there was no shortage of Conservative MPs tweeting to Musk to claim that he could have provided Starlink for cheaper, even though what Telesat was looking to do was not entirely the same as what Starlink offers. Nevertheless, Musk has been a vocal critic of Justin Trudeau and has threatened to help remove him from office, which should be fairly concerning when we talk about foreign interference in our elections, coming from someone who has a demonstrated ability and willingness to manipulate the algorithms on his social media platform to benefit of this preferred political candidate. Conservatives in this country would no doubt welcome any assistance he would offer, believing that he’s doing it for the “right reasons” (i.e. benefitting their electoral chances) rather than because he expects favours in return (i.e. deregulating things that pertain to his business interests).

Poilievre has already been making a big production of listening to tech bros in Canada, particularly those at Shopify, who have been one of the country’s largest success stories. Poilievre recently tweeted support for a rant from CFO Kaz Nejatian about how the answer to building in Canada is to “cut regulation,” and while he bemoans that it has become “impossible to build” in Canada, the same thing is being said by people in pretty much every Western country, including the US. (It also bears mentioning that Nejatian’s wife runs a far-right “media” outlet whom the Conservatives are fond of, so the connections with the Conservatives are already baked in). But we should be cautious about the constant calls to “cut regulation,” because we have to remember what a lot of that regulation is for—health and safety, labour standards, or frankly to ensure that corporations don’t abuse environmental or human rights. The demand to “cut regulation” is frequently a call to governments to allow them to exploit either the environment or workers, which is precisely why it some of the calls for deregulation to be resisted.

I have little doubt that there are places where regulations create problems and inefficiencies—municipal zoning rules and certain building code measures that contradict best practices in jurisdictions like Europe being a prime example—but these are things that federal governments can have very little control over, which is the point of the Housing Accelerator Fund, to try and drive those changes (and no, Poilievre’s plan to punish or reward municipalities for housing completion targets won’t work because he’s trying to use funds that don’t go to municipalities, but go to provinces directly). But we also have to remember that we’ve had attempts at federal and provincial levels to “cut red tape” for going on a couple of decades now and wouldn’t you know it, those same complaints about regulation are still coming from the business community, which again raises the suspicion that this is more about looking for the ability to exploit.

When asked about the tech broligarchy’s influence in American politics right now, journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, calling it an incoming “techno-oligarchic regime,” made the following observation: “One of the mistakes that people are making is that imagining the executive more power, including effectively power without control or the ability to bend the law, is that it will somehow be good for business. This is a very seductive argument that I think a lot of people do believe—Musk, Theil, and maybe Bezos and Zuckerberg. They think it will be good for them, and they could be right in the short term… The mistake they make, and in the longer term, almost always these regimes are bad for business. Hungary, which is a state that so many on the far-right now admire as a model, is now, depending on how you count, the second or third-poorest country in Europe.”

There is reason to be concerned with Poilievre’s professed desire to broadly deregulate in his quest for smaller government and a doctrinaire belief that “gatekeepers” and bureaucracy are what is stifling the economy. As much as he currently professes to be a convert to private-sector labour support, his own record betrays that claim, which likely means a potential rollback of protections for workers (cheered on by certain business lobby groups, in spite of Poilievre badmouthing them). Environmental protections and regulations are almost guaranteed to be slashed under a Poilievre government, but as was demonstrated under the Harper years, this merely led to an increase in litigation that didn’t make projects happen any faster—it just made a whole bunch of lawyers a whole lot richer. I have little doubt that Poilievre will also follow the siren call of more authoritarian executive powers supposedly being good for business, to the detriment of long-term thinking and action, particularly if more of the tech bros he idolizes start banging that drum for him. There will be no smart or logical way to tackle regulatory inefficiency—it will be a slash and burn approach that will benefit a very select few people, and be a major detriment to the majority of Canadians.