Daniel Debow Wants Canada To Get Rich Quicker

February marked the launch of Build Canada, a mysterious website that loftily promised plans for a “bolder, richer, freer country.” Soon, more details emerged: it was a non-partisan forum for entrepreneurs of all stripes to publish their visionary, occasionally radical policy ideas for bettering Canada. (Examples included making its public service leaner, its health records more accessible and its markets more friendly to drone-makers.) Once word broke that several Shopify execs—some quite vocally right-leaning—were possibly involved on the back end, the tech panic began: was Build Canada just DOGE 2.0?

“Absolutely not,” insists Daniel Debow, Shopify’s former VP of partnerships and corporate development and Build Canada’s unofficial head honcho. Even if Canadians don’t know Debow’s name, they’ve interacted with a company he either co-founded or invested in early—like Wealthsimple, SkipTheDishes, Ritual, Borrowell and Rypple, a cloud-based HR firm acquired by Salesforce for a cool $60 million. While Debow and Build Canada’s volunteer team aren’t planning an Elon-esque government takeover, they do have the business bona fides to know that, after years of sluggish productivity, the country could do with way less red tape and a gigantic injection of inspiration.

You’ve been on pseudo-sabbatical since you left Shopify back in December. How does a serial business-building brain like yours cope with more free time?

I’m spending time with my family, who I love. I’ve tried to learn how to cook. I’m also figuring out how to build electronic instruments—I want to invent a new one.

Within a couple months of wrapping work, you launched another huge new project: Build Canada. What’s the elevator pitch?

It’s a website that allows Canadian “builders”—people who’ve created high-growth businesses, whether that’s a startup or a brewpub—to take their policy ideas and turn them into specific, actionable memos that people can read and react to. Each builder meets with a volunteer to get their idea down—they may use AI tools like OpenAI and Perplexity to help with research, writing and fact-checking—then the humans stitch it together. The memo is also reviewed by public policy people. Some have worked in Parliament; some are in academia. The day in, day out is run by a core group of five to 10 volunteers, but about 50 people have pitched in in one way or another. They’re not all CEOs or founders, but there are a couple of those.

And you’re the guy who brought the whole thing together?

I’m chief cheerleader and cattle rustler—cat herder, maybe. I’d just finished my job, and I should’ve been playing a lot of music. But what I saw was, Oh my gosh, there’s an election coming! Change is happening. And what people are upset about in Canada is public policy. Health care, immigration, tax policy, regulatory policy—go down the list. Those were the things everyone wanted to talk about.

Like all the best plans, Build Canada was hatched in a group chat—the rumour was it started in one with members of what’s been called the “Shopify Mafia.”

It was actually the result of multiple group chats. In mine, there were lots of businesspeople, but also friends who are teachers, accountants, lawyers, doctors and landscapers. The feeling from people in every industry, across the board, was: we want to grow economically, and it’s harder than it needs to be. How can we put out ideas that could have a direct, positive impact on Canada’s GDP? That was the chat. 

Thanks for clearing that up. To some outsiders, this project seemed a bit mysterious—a bit Wizard of Oz. 

We did the exact opposite of the wizard behind the curtain. What’s the traditional complaint about how Canadian businesspeople have engaged with the government? They do it behind closed doors or in smoky back-room meetings. We publish ideas on the internet. 

What advantage does the memo route have over the usual bureaucratic policy process?

The memos aren’t a substitute for that. I’ve been tangentially involved in public policy: I taught a class on law and policy related to exponential tech at the University of Toronto, and I was part of Canada’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth in 2016. Basically, I recognized that no one hears complaints from a group chat. And a tweet or an op-ed? Policy folks and politicians—Liberal and Conservative—I spoke to said, “We can’t do anything with those.” The memos allow policy organizations to study ideas in a consumable format. The authors also have lots of different views; we don’t require unanimity. 

What have reactions to the ideas been like?

I didn’t expect young people would be emailing us saying, “Can I buy a Build Canada hat?” But not everybody agrees with every piece we’ve posted. I wrote one about requiring Canadians aged 18 to 30 to choose between a year in the military or a year working in the civil service. People loved and hated that. But Build Canada’s general idea is: don’t try to seek consensus, try to generate lots of ideas for the marketplace. That might be why some people are put off. They’re like, “There’s an established process—what are you doing just publishing these things?” That’s a very Canadian reaction: this is the way we do things. Back in April, we launched a real-time tracker of the candidates’ election promises. A couple of people went, “You shouldn’t be doing anything like this during an election. It’s too important!” That’s exactly the wrong intuition. In this country, the standard for how far we go before we try something has to be lowered. That’s how you advance. 

Were there any ideas pitched by folks outside of tech—so, not classic startup “bros”— that especially excited you?

I’m not really complaining, but calling a group of people bros—a group that includes women, by the way—it’s a bit of a pejorative. Same with “broligarchy.” It’s funny when I hear journalists say that. It’s like, Of course we can pick on them. They’re businesspeople. And they’re rich, too! 

I meant “bro”—in air quotes. 

I know. I totally get it. I’m just giving you a hard time. Anyway, I was really excited when Adam Waterous, CEO of Waterous Energy Fund—a Calgary-based private equity firm in oil and gas—wrote his paper. He laid out the need to declare an energy emergency and fast-track the regulatory process—while making sure Indigenous communities were deeply part of that process—and do it all in a way that rapidly grows our GDP. What I liked was that he articulated that we can’t have our cake and eat it too. We want to be a green economy and have unlimited time for consultations and stakeholder analysis. These are good things, but they come at a cost. So that memo was pretty exciting—aside from the ones by the “tech bros,” as you said.

With air quotes! Build Canada popped up after many, shall we say, disillusioning years for the tech sector: some innovation investments that the Liberal government didn’t follow through on, a series of layoffs in 2022, the proposed hike to the capital gains inclusion rate that pissed all of you off. Some see this project as a kind of tech-industry tantrum, a backlash framed as innovation. Building Canada for whom? 

I find it astonishing that people changing their mind about who they support politically is some sort of scandal. What’s the term that people have used to describe what’s happening in tech? “Rightward drift?” No, this is just people changing their mind as, by the way, millions of Canadians have done. A lot of Build Canada entrepreneurs are liberal—they’ve worked for the Liberals. It’s definitely not a backlash. That’s simply false.

Okay, but a few Build Canada supporters—or folks who have been namechecked as being involved with it—tweet in favour of deregulation, privatization, leaner social services. (The “right” stuff.) The goal here is to help or advise the government, not to be the government, right?

No one’s trying to run the government. Also, nothing just magically, immediately gets implemented. Lots of Build Canada ideas are pretty centrist. For example, I don’t think the idea that we should build intergenerational equity by investing in $10,000 trust funds for Canadian kids is a rightward policy. And of the three or four papers on government productivity, I think one of them said we should use AI to automate our systems to make them more efficient. A Fraser Institute poll from 2024 found that less than 16 per cent of Canadians believe they get good value from the federal government. That’s not a right-wing talking point. That’s how Canadians feel.

Fair enough.

I spoke with a senior public servant who said that you could get rid of 100,000 government workers overnight and things would get more efficient very quickly. Government isn’t a business—and it shouldn’t run like a business—but it does have to be effective. It’s not supposed to be an employment agency. We need to get past the ad hominem, right-left thing and be like, Here are the facts. Can we do better? 

I agree with you about ad hominem attacks. People are just a little spooked right now because, well, I’m going to use the D-word. I guess it’s the D-acronym: DOGE. Nobody wants some maniac with a chainsaw coming in and destroying our government.

First of all, I don’t either. Second of all, I’m not a maniac. Third, I don’t have a chainsaw. Are people freaked out about DOGE? Clearly. I don’t think that’s a good prescription for how to do things.

DEI is a subject that’s coming up a lot right now—you know, the thing some Americans think is causing plane crashes and measles. A wave of companies, including Shopify, have been rolling back their DEI initiatives. On a recent episode of The Hard Part podcast, you said you’re “not a huge fan” of the way we’ve done DEI. Why?

We’re entering an unstable geopolitical age, of which Trump is just a symptom. Old assumptions about Canada’s place in the world are fading away. It’s a crisis moment; I’ve used the term “economic COVID.” If you read the mandate letters of Justin Trudeau’s government—for the Department of National Defence, for many of them—the priority was “EDI,” as they called it. He was essentially saying, I think this is the most important thing that we can do, and, given the world at the time, maybe it was. I’m suggesting that, in the world we live in now, it’s an important thing, it just might not be the most important thing. 

With respect to companies, though, can’t you have DEI programs and growth? Is it really an either-or?

It’s not an either-or. You can have diverse environments and grow effectively—100 per cent. The difference, maybe, between me and other people is that I’m having a hair-on-fire moment about Canada right now. If you take “elbows up” seriously, take the fact that we have an existential threat in the U.S. seriously, take the Chinese and Russian threats seriously, we’ve got to make decisions quickly so we can put ourselves in a stronger position in a few years. I want a world where everybody has opportunity, where everyone can bring something to the table—that’s a classically liberal concept. That’s the Enlightenment. I strongly endorse that, and I’ve tried to live my life that way. To me, “focusing” just means that the priority of every government ministry has to be on growing the country. 

Do you remember your first business idea? I’m talking lemonade stand–early.

It wasn’t really a business. I was on student council and I used to organize the concerts at my high school—“YM Rocks!” for York Mills Collegiate Institute. Frankly, nobody wanted to go to a high school event, so that was my first foray into how do you market an idea? I had to book the bands and the AV and, of course, charge admission. The only people who made money were my buddies, who I hired to do security. I think they were scalping tickets. I didn’t make any money, but I loved it. 

You’ve probably heard the term “brain drain” more than you would’ve liked, but thanks to Donald Trump, Canada’s now experiencing symptoms of a brain gain. Is there chatter about this in your network? 

It’s limited, unfortunately. It’s amazing that we’re getting more academics. It’s important that we get scientists here, too—STEM researchers, all sorts—because that’s key for our future. Still, if we don’t figure out how to commercialize that science and turn it into IP-based businesses that bring wealth to the country, what’s the point? I mean—I understand the point of generating knowledge, but there has to be a return beyond just knowledge. 

Do you know anyone who’s moving north?

Do I hear from businesspeople wanting to come to Canada? Not really. I had one reach out, but it was more like, “I feel badly for Canadians. I want to try and do some business there so I can help.”

Ouch. 

I know a lot of great entrepreneurs who are either moving or considering moving to the States. Every Canadian knows someone who’s done that: sought their fortune elsewhere. People hand-wave this problem. Don’t worry, others will come! Some might say, “Good riddance!” But that’s a losing game. Like any other specialized profession—cardiac surgeon, NBA player—entrepreneurs have talent, but the way they operate is a bit different. They’re a scarce resource. You know, one of my favorite movies to watch with my kids is Ratatouille.

Yep, I’m with you. 

The story is that anyone can cook, right? Yes, anyone can cook anything, but a small group of people can make something really exceptional. You need a special rat—you need Remy—to do that. There are only so many Remys out there. We can’t have them leaving all the time!

You got your master of laws at Stanford University and, for a while, you were a VP at Salesforce, which is headquartered in California. You could’ve made a life in or around Silicon Valley—the big pond. What called you home, when so many folks leave Canada as fast as they can?

I did work in the States for a while. My first job out of undergrad was with the Western University chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. I’m really not helping myself here; I’m playing to type.

The “bro” type.

Yeah. I went to 50 North American cities to recruit and open chapters. After that, I came back to U of T for law and business school. Why Canada, though? It’s home. My friends are here. I remember the CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, was like, “You have to come to the U.S.!” I said, “Why? I live in one of the greatest cities in the world. It’s got restaurants and culture and interesting people and academia. It’s walkable. Why should I leave?” He didn’t have a good answer for me. 

It is pretty great here.

Canadians are good people. They’re decent and hardworking and they give a shit. I want to be surrounded by that all the time. That said, we do ourselves no service by looking down our noses at anybody, including the Americans—although, these days, wow. What the hell? 

Memos aside, what are you reading now?

I’ll randomly pull out what’s on my bookshelf. I’m in the middle of Sea People, which is an anthropological history of Polynesia. I read a book on the Celts, and the Romans before that. Let’s see what’s on my desk…

That’s good—

The Art of Not Being Governed by James Scott. I just finished The Company, which is about the Hudson’s Bay Company. I ordered Company of Adventurers, Peter Newman’s book on the same topic. I’m usually just grazing—oh, here’s something new! Matt Ridley’s Birds, Sex and Beauty. He has another book called The Rational Optimist. I find that concept pretty inspiring.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.