Canadian DOGE website launches | Financial Post

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The Canadian tech leaders, founders, and entrepreneurs behind Build Canada — a public platform for policy ideas — are championing a separate platform to track government spending ahead of the April federal election.

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Originally introduced in February, the platform, called Canada Spends, will be relaunched March 26 in a bid to make government spending more transparent and easier to understand for Canadians, according to the group.

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The new iteration of the website will offer the public a “clearer (and) more detailed look at how public funds are allocated,” said Lucy Hargreaves, a founding member of Canada Spends and vice-president of corporate affairs and policy at Patch, a San Francisco-based climate software startup. “We see it helping to give Canadians the facts about the current state of play in government spending,” she said.

The platform’s founding members were motivated and frustrated by what they deem as the “lack of clear, accessible, unbiased data on government spending,” according to the website’s mission statement. It added: “We wanted to create a platform … giving Canadians data-driven facts about how their money is being spent without spin.”

Both the Liberal and Conservative party leaders have indicated that if elected, they will slash what they call wasteful government spending. Liberal Party Leader Mark Carney has promised to “slow the growth of government spending, cap the size of the public service, and use technology to reduce inefficiencies.” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that his party will “cut bureaucracy, consultants, corporate welfare, foreign and other wasted money.”

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“Having the facts will help Canadians be better equipped to engage on this topic” as the public prepares to take a vote on April 28, Hargreaves said.

Key changes to the Canada Spends website includes the addition of an interactive chart for all Government of Canada spending that will look similar to the U.S.’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) federal spending site. DOGE, spearheaded by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, aims to cut US$1 trillion in federal spending by the end of 2025.

The revamped platform will also include department-by-department spending breakdowns of Canada’s largest federal agencies including the Department of Finance, Employment and Social Development Canada and Health Canada, among others.

All of the data comes from Government of Canada resources. The group primarily uses public accounts data, and has utilized publicly available Treasury Board data for certain workforce statistics.

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Alongside Hargreaves, the core team managing Canada Spends includes Brice Scheschuk, the co-founder and former chief financial officer of Wind Mobile and managing partner at investment firm Globalive Capital; Brendan Samek, a founding software engineer at AI e-commerce customer service firm Yuma; and Todd Scheidt, the co-founder and advisor at carbon capture firm E-Quester and former head of revenue operations at Shopify Inc.

Some critics have expressed concerns that the individuals behind Canada Spends and Build Canada are pushing for a Canadian version of the U.S.’s DOGE led by the tech community. Academics who study Canada’s public finances note that the government already has its own publicly available platform called InfoBase where anyone can see how the government spends, where people work and employee demographics of government agencies.

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“There are all sorts of feedback loops to challenge where governments spend and what result they get, so that the people we elect can decide where to allocate resources,” said Michael Wernick, the Jarislowsky chair in public sector management at the University of Ottawa and former head of Canada’s federal public service.

Genevieve Tellier, a professor of political studies at the University of Ottawa who studies budgetary policies and public finances of federal and provincial governments, said that while more transparency was welcome, visitors should consider the motivations of those presenting the data as well.

“People can want to participate in the democratic process and examine the actions of the government more carefully to push their own self-interest,” she said. “What we see in the U.S. is more cynicism toward the government. It feels like this is what is done here too with Canada Spends — nuances are missing.”

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The group refutes the suggestion that it is aiming to create a Canadian DOGE.

“We’re not copying the DOGE playbook from the U.S.,” the Canada Spends website says. “We care about Canada being a self-sustaining, independent and resilient country. Our government is going to have to make hard choices about our nation’s spending to ensure we can invest in creating a competitive, resilient, and independent nation.”

• Email: ylau@postmedia.com

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