VUONG: Canadians need to stop cutting down our tall poppies

· Toronto Sun

Canada has a productivity problem. We also have a personality problem, and they’re essentially the same problem.

Last week, the CEO of Canada’s most valuable company – Shopify –replied to a stranger’s thought experiment on X with two words : “Good system.”

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That was it. There was no manifesto. No bill. No campaign. It was simply a retired banker floating the idea of weighting votes by income tax paid. Tobi Lütke literally typed two words.

Within days, it was spun into a national emergency. Our public broadcaster ran it as a story about a billionaire who wants to strip the poor and the elderly of the franchise . A Toronto Metropolitan University “expert” was produced to explain that people with that kind of wealth are out of touch and think they should be calling the shots. Then the closing lecture, delivered right on cue: get out and vote, before men like him decide for you.

Set aside the idea. Equal suffrage is settled – full stop. In Canada, it’s one person, one vote.

Instead, let’s look at what actually happened here. A man who built a company out of an online snowboard shop in Ottawa into a business worth north of $200 billion, serving millions of merchants and entrepreneurs around the world, and the best use our national broadcaster could find for a week was to turn a two word tweet into a morality play.

Then the pile-on found another left wing “expert.”

A labour economist arrived to explain that Lütke isn’t really all that important. Shopify ranks about 70th among Canadian companies by headcount – behind Leon’s. Thirty-sixth by revenue. Only a bubble-inflated share price gives him any prominence at all, he crowed. It’s all financialization, apparently. Not acumen or hard work.

Read that again. The proposed measure of a Canadian company’s worth is how many people it has to employ. That is not an economic argument befitting of an economist. It’s a tally of costs dressed up as a tally of value.

Most importantly, a firm that produced more than $16 billion in revenue last year with roughly 7,600 employees is not a lesser company than one that needs 40,000 to do less. It is a more productive one.

Output per worker is the precise thing our country has been bleeding for a decade. It’s what every finance minister, of every stripe, has said keeps them up at night. And here is a credentialed economist treating it as a mark against a Canadian firm that has it.

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The head office payroll was never the point anyway. Shopify’s business is other people’s businesses. The employment number that matters is the merchants. It’s the entrepreneurs who never had to ask a bank, a landlord, or a buyer at a department store for permission to start.

There’s even a name for what the alumni go on to do. The ‘Shopify Mafia’ … Former employees who left with capital, skill, and nerve, and built the next thing.

They created more companies and more high-paying jobs for Canadians. They also helped to generate the next round of Canadian founders, as BlackBerry and Nortel did before them. We used to understand that this is how an ecosystem compounds.

But what should especially trouble Canadians is how, at best, confused or, worse, intentionally disingenuous and manipulative some of our nation’s chattering class have become.

Because the people who spent last week warning about the outsized influence of tech billionaires have it exactly backwards. Tobi Lütke does not run this country. He does not write the tax code. He does not staff the regulators, set the immigration levels, or decide which pipeline dies in committee. Ottawa does that – and they know it.

The people with genuine influence in Canada are not the builders and haven’t been for a long time now. It’s the lobbyists, the incumbents, and the consultants who have been thriving when the rules and bureaucracy are large, cumbersome, and complex.

Canada would be infinitely better off if entrepreneurs and job creators had even an ounce of the influence their critics imagine they have.

Tall poppy syndrome isn’t a charming quirk of the national character. The sad truth is it’s closer to national policy and deeply damaging to our current and future prosperity.

Succeed here and your reward is scrutiny no cabinet minister faces today. Say one heterodox thing and the broadcaster we’re forced to pay for will make an example of you.

Then we act surprised when the ambitious ones leave. Canadians need to stop cutting down our tall poppies. Not for Tobi Lütke’s sake – he’ll be fine either way – but for ours.

Because a field of stumps isn’t equality. It’s just a field of stumps.

– Kevin Vuong is the former member of Parliament for Toronto’s Spadina-Fort York. The son of refugees, he continues his public service as a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and as an entrepreneur and naval reserve officer.

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