We might need to encourage small businesses and individuals to be innovative by changing some rules but we don’t need tech bros for shit they can go play in traffic. Their delusional self absorbed attitudes will hurt more people than help.

What they’re saying isn’t wrong, Canadian productivity is very low, innovation is primarily isolated to large institutions, many of which are subsidized, and occasional small plucky outliers who have snuck through the great filter of regulations and usually get quickly gobbled up. The problem is I doubt any solution these tech bros propose will be used to improve it. I don’t trust their motives at all.

I do have problems with the way so many of Canada’s regulations are unfairly oppressive and obstructionist for actual entrepreneurs – I’m speaking of actual single individuals and very small groups, with genuinely limited resources, who don’t have the time or energy or employees or financial capacity to navigate the complicated bureaucracy of tediously expensive, overwhelmingly detailed and sometimes changing regulations. Everyone wants a piece of the pie before you’ve even made any pie. Our regulations tend to be very bottom-heavy and front-loaded and become relatively more onerous the smaller and less well resourced you are, they lack any reasonable scaling, exemptions and incentives for small business and small operations and I think that’s intentional, it is a classic protectionist strategy which immensely pleases many of our entrenched oligopolies.

I can think of many very highly specific examples that I’m not going to share because I don’t want to get into the weeds of highly specific industries, but I think it’s safe to claim that they all have their fair share of anti-small-business regulation. Of course taxes are one issue that every business has to deal with that could be improved and simplified vastly for small business. Tax credit programs like SR&ED that are ostensibly there to foster innovation tend to just become distracting time and effort black holes for small businesses while huge companies like Bell employ or hire experts on this process with a legal team to back them up who help them walk away with millions.

Anyone who’s ever had to deal with Transport Canada for anything vehicle, aviation or rocket or drone related, or Industry Canada for anything radio related, or Health Canada for anything person related, or Natural Resources Canada for the environment, the RCMP about anything potentially dangerous like weapons, or CFIA for anything food related, or CBSA for anything border related, knows that these organizations are deeply risk-averse brick walls for entrepreneurs, hobbyists and innovators alike. And that’s basically their mandate. However the larger and more well-funded you are, the less risky you seem to magically appear to them. I’m speaking from some experience here. And another problem is look how many I’ve just named off the top of my head, it’s not even always clear who you need to be talking to about what. The problem is small business needs to be able to take risks to succeed and if that’s going to cause risks to the public, I understand the concern, but the government and their agencies need to step in and provide tools and regimes where we can test and minimize and manage that risk instead of stonewalling and putting the entire burden on small businesses which simply cannot bear that burden. You’re always guilty until proven innocent when it comes to these sort of regulations and unless you have the resources to prove that you’re innocent you’ll never be allowed to make any progress. And the height of the bar required to prove you’re innocent seemingly changes based on how much money you have, but in the opposite direction of what it should.

If you try to get around the lack of resources by going to the banks for a loan to pay for or hire the resources you need, a) you’ll have to give them collateral and the banks love that, and b) now you’ve got a staunchly conservative bank looking over your shoulder constantly and they hate risk even more than the government agencies, and c) the banks themselves are strictly regulated so even if they wanted to help you they often can’t. That is sort of a crappy way of solving the problem, and so the fact that it doesn’t solve the problem isn’t so concerning, as it wouldn’t even have to BE a problem if all the rest of the regulations on small business weren’t so bad, but it closes off any possible relief valve of letting the banks inject capital into small businesses which could at least mitigate the blockage.

Canada seems to have this general attitude that treating small business and large business exactly the same is exactly what makes their regulations fair and even-handed when in fact and in actual outcome it’s anything but. “Bank of Dave” provides a great illustration of some of the unfairness in this kind of unnecessary and harmful overregulation of very small fish in a very big pond and the way it inhibits actual entrepreneurs and entire communities from achieving success, it’s UK based but I think the general concepts translate pretty well to Canada too.

Only if Canada is a part of the world.

Because they’re everywhere, running the exact same playbook.

Short answer, Yes.

Long answer: the wealthy need more money because enough is never enough for them.