Tobias Lutke, the CEO of Canadian tech giant Shopify, says the federal government should stop bribing foreign companies with taxpayer money to create jobs in Canada.

He was responding to Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s X post celebrating foreign tech giant Nokia’s heavily government-funded Ottawa campus, which is now under construction.

While great for Nokia’s bottom line, these subsidies are “toxic” to our tech economy because they allow foreign companies to operate within Canada at a lower cost than their Canadian competitors and all the “fruits of the subsidized labour will accrue to the wealth of other countries and not Canada,” argues Lutke.

He’s right: our government should not be picking winners, especially foreign ones — and with taxpayer money, to boot.

Joly’s post, which

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