Tobias (Tobi) Lütke is among the most successful entrepreneurs Canada has produced.
The co-founder of Ottawa-based Shopify Inc., an e-commerce pioneer with $16 billion in revenues in more than 170 countries, is also an agent provocateur.
Against the Canadian tradition of low-profile business leaders, Lütke likes to make his views known. They range from usefully unorthodox to socially retrograde, as with the firestorm he ignited on the Civic Holiday weekend in suggesting that seniors and Canadians living in poverty should be denied the vote.
No liberal democracy has experimented with disenfranchising what in Canada would amount to more than 12 million people, or close to one-third of the total population.
Full disclosure: At 68 years of age, I have a bias as one of the people Lütke is targeting. (Lütke is about 46.)
In posts on X, Lütke had these words for Canada’s seniors: “New deal,” he wrote. “When you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.”
Lütke, a billionaire several times over, also laid into objections voiced at community meetings to a proposed expansion of the Billy Bishop Airport on the Toronto waterfront. Those who objected, Lütke said, were “Retired, Unemployed, Unemployable...useful idiots are the only people who go to these town hall sessions.”
Obviously on a roll that day, Lütke also endorsed an idea from a retired banker: “What about a weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay,” wrote Eric Thor in an X exchange with Lütke.
It would work like this: “No income tax paid – 0 vote, $1-100k – 1 vote, $100-200k 2 votes and so on…cap it at 5 votes for $500k+” to “build a democracy around those that foot the bill?”
Lütke thought that idea to be “good.” It would “reward productive people with leverage,” he wrote.
In all, that is the kind of rubbish one hears at last call at the pub. It is easily dismissed.
But Lütke built an online snowboard store into today’s Shopify. About 7,600 people draw a paycheque from Shopify, which has six million customers worldwide and a stock market valuation of approximately $272 billion.
So, Lütke commands attention as a major employer, as CEO of one of Canada’s few big multinationals, and as a leader in integrating AI into the operations of a complex organization.
This isn’t the first time Lütke has disturbed Canada’s image of itself as a land of hard-working achievers. In a 2024 podcast, Lütke said Canada lacks ambition.
“Canada’s problem, often culturally, is a go-for-bronze mentality,” Lütke said.
“Canada wants to invent,” Lütke said. “Canada loves to have a eureka moment. But it’s seen as a low-status thing to build a business around it. We are not metabolizing any kind of innovation.”
That is largely true. It is to weep that Canada’s community of top AI researchers largely functions as a farm team for Silicon Valley.
But on denying groups of Canadians the vote, Lütke is on shaky ground.
Lütke does have some support on that from British researcher Tim Vlandas, a professor of political economy and social policy at the University of Oxford. Vlandas wrote in a report last year that large elderly populations “contribute to economic stagnation in two ways.
“First, governments tend to prioritize pension protection — whose costs rise over time — at the expense of more growth-enhancing policies,” Vlandas writes.
“Second, ageing electorates reduce the political incentives for parties to promote economic growth or address the structural drivers of stagnation, as poor economic performance is less likely to be punished at the ballot box in ageing advanced capitalist democracies.”
We could do with more research to verify Vlandas’ claims. Vlandas acknowledges as much. “The political consequences of ageing for the economy have remained largely absent from this discussion,” he writes.
We have little data on the voting behaviour of seniors and low-income Canadians.
We do know that most low-income Canadians are striving to join the middle class. In doing so, they make a valuable contribution to the country as underpaid nurses, construction workers and so on. And as parents, of course.
And we are grateful to our seniors, who built one of the world’s most successful countries.
Practically speaking, today’s working-age Canadians looking ahead to a retirement without pensions or the ability to help shape the country with their votes would have less incentive to contribute.
It is a shame. Lütke has the money to fund the research on voting patterns and much else about Canadians trapped in poverty, and about seniors, who will account for about one in four Canadians by 2035.
For now, Lütke has only confirmed the view of some that billionaires should be denied the vote and maybe their soapboxes as well.
