Canadian billionaire Tobias Lütke recently made headlines after taking to social media to endorse the idea that the rich should have more votes than everyone else and that anyone dependent on the state—like pensioners—should have none. Lütke was miffed that citizens overwhelmingly rejected Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s proposal to expand the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport to accommodate jets in a public consultation with federal politicians. Reactions to Lütke’s comments were swift and uniformly negative, particularly in Canada. Whether coming from the left or right, people didn’t take kindly to the idea of the ultra-rich telling them who should and shouldn’t be allowed to vote. As a computer programmer and CEO of Shopify, a global e-commerce company with a market cap of $160 billion, Lütke’s views mirror those of other tech bros like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman who routinely dismiss democracy to boost their own idiosyncratic brands of libertarian authoritarianism. They justify such exclusions on the basis of their own technical, entrepreneurial, and financial success. As Lütke remarked on X,
let people with a stake in the future decide.
At one level, Lütke’s views can be easily dismissed as the self-interested rantings of a privileged and entitled individual. Lütke, whose net worth is estimated at around $10 billion, seems unaware of the most obvious irony in his argument about who has earned a stake in the future: his apparent assumption that the tech sector has been free of dependence on the state. In fact, decades of government investment in early research acted as the foundational precursor to many important innovations—GPS, the Internet—as well as the modern tech sector itself. But at another level Lütke’s views typify what many members of the uber wealthy have always thought about themselves and what their role should be in influencing government. The only real difference with Lütke’s recent comments is that he uttered them publicly. His outburst is an opportunity to scrutinize how wealth affects Canadian political participation and decision-making and why it has the influence it does, which is especially important today given the ever-widening gap between rich and poor across the West.
Let’s be clear at the outset: Canada’s business community has never been that keen on democracy. When we examine the various historical struggles to expand and equalize public influence over government a variety of business organizations and corporate leaders have routinely objected. Canada’s dominant founding fathers, Conservative John A. Macdonald and Liberal Wilfred Laurier, both opposed full male suffrage, let alone expanding the franchise to include women, Indigenous peoples, and anyone who was not white. That was very much at the behest of the corporate donors that funded both parties. The democratic struggles waged by unions, community groups, and left political parties during and after the two world wars were fiercely opposed by business interests, which conspired with the state to suppress these movements while sponsoring widespread media campaigns to vilify them. Communications scholar Donald Gutstein has painstakingly documented how a range of thinly-veiled business front-groups posing as research institutes (including the Fraser Institute and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute) have peddled pro-business, anti-democratic messaging since the 1970s, flush with corporate money to do so. Even Lütke’s proposal to link voting to wealth is hardly new or original as property-based voting was the traditional 19th century, pre-democratic approach to governing. In fact, property-based voting restrictions continued to exist in Canada throughout most of the last century across numerous municipal locales.
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The striking thing about Lütke’s call for a return to a kind of property-based voting is his apparent concern that somehow those with a “stake in the future” (that is, business) do not have enough influence right now. But research on who influences government suggests otherwise. One recent study by Canadian academics Nicolas Graham, Bryan Evans and David Chen found that over an 11 year period from 2011 to 2022, 81 percent of the lobbyists meeting politicians in Ottawa represented business interests. According to public interest advocacy group Democracy Watch, the wealthy also disproportionately fund our two main governing parties, contributing 40 percent of the donations to the federal Liberals and 30 percent of the federal Conservatives in the period between 2016 and 2022. And such influence tends to get results. Research on American political outcomes over time shows that the policy preferences of the wealthy win out over all others most of the time, especially when the preferences of the wealthy conflict with those of everyone else. Canadian research echoes these findings. Regrettably, this tends to elicit little comment from our politicians because they are disproportionately drawn from the most privileged sectors of the economy—law, medicine, academe, business—which tend to see such results as normal or appropriate. By contrast, over the past century the percentage of Canadian MPs from the working-class has rarely exceeded two percent in any Parliament.
Expert responses to Lütke’s proposals have been quick to point out that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms spells out voting rights for citizens and that income is not listed as a potentially mitigating factor. That is true, but citizens should also be aware that invoking Charter rights is a very expensive proposition, one that experts agree is, in most cases, beyond the finances of even middle-class litigants, never mind the poor and working classes. And even if people can get a challenge going, the gap between the violation of a Charter right and its redress by the courts can take a great deal of time—years, sometimes decades. If the current shenanigans going on south of the Canadian border are anything to go by—and they include violations of free speech, due process, the rule of law, voting rights, and the right to legal representation—promises of legal protections are ultimately reliant on the political will of governing elites to either observe or defy them.
The recent firestorm over Lütke’s call for greater political influence for the wealthy blew up primarily because he said out loud what most of his class really thinks but seldom admits—namely, that being rich gives you the right to order other people around. This goes against the grain of the dominant representations of the wealthy in Canadian media. We must remember that, generally speaking, the rich really do excel at public relations. Most media stories about monied individuals tend to focus on how charitable they are, with fawning attention to the substantial sums given to hospitals and universities. Research showing how the wealthy are actually less giving than other classes when we compare what proportion of their income they give away, that the high-giving wealthy are themselves a distinct minority amongst the rich, and that the wealthy can use charities to mask what amount to controversial political donations, tends to gets less attention. More public knowledge about how the rich think and actually behave could help to dispel such myths. As such, Lütke’s unscripted admissions are an opportune wake-up call to the Canadian public: the wealthy are no friends of democracy.
Dennis Pilon is chair and a professor in the Department of Politics at York University and a former member of the CD collective.