Don’t forget to regulate Canadian Big Tech too

Ex-Blackberry CEO wants Canada to regulate American tech companies like Google and Facebook. While we’re at it, let’s better regulate Canadian tech companies too.

Photo by Radovan on Unsplash

Two years ago, Jim Balsille, the former Blackberry CEO who once told investors that Apple was not a competitor and called iPhone users members of a distortion field, began lecturing Canada on how to be more globally competitive. Balsille warned that U.S. Big Tech (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM etc.) would use their global enterprises to effectively turn Canada into branch offices unless the Canadian government took swift action in the national interests of the Canadian tech sector.

Last week, Balsillie took his quixotic mission to the front steps of Parliament Hill in Ottawa, where he deputed at a Commons committee session about how Canada should regulate American surveillance capitalists like Google and Facebook. It’s always odd when billionaires get upset about capitalism and make the case for greater government regulation, but Balsille’s actions are in keeping with his greater ambitions to build more technology and preserve more of its wealth in Canada.

Balsille actually has the right idea about European-style government regulation, but his call to action falls short for the majority of people who work in the tech industry. Yes, we should regulate American tech capitalism so they aren’t watching us creepily. But while we’re regulating American Big Tech, we should better regulate Canadian Big Tech too.

What Canadian Big Tech lobbies for

Since the rise of Blackberry in the late 1990s, Balsille has been privy to one of Canada’s best kept secrets: if you want to build a world-class technology company, hire world-class engineering undergraduates, like the young people who built Blackberry into a global titan, fresh after their Waterloo engineering days. When the secret got out, American Big Tech companies began to make lucrative employment offers to undergraduates, often before they had even graduated their programs. The rising threat of losing talented tech workers to Google and Facebook caused Balsille to (in his own words) “break out in a cold sweat”. Balsille described an innocent Canadian tech sector under attack from the big bad Americans. He cited his experience at Blackberry as proof that he understood how to fight a global corporate battle properly. He invoked revolutionary language of self-determinism, self-defense and sovereignty to make his case for swift government action. To address the growing threat of American tech capitalism, Balsille proposed a curious solution: Canadian tech CEOs must out-lobby American tech CEOs.

Shortly after, Balsille joined forces with venture capitalist executive John Ruffolo to create the Canadian Innovators Council (CIC), an Ottawa-based technology lobby firm. The CIC was founded on the mythical premise that Canadian tech business founders and investors were modern-day national heroes, who give their blood, sweat and tears to the tech industry, in order to build wealth for their country, only to have it stolen by American giants.

Today, the CIC advocates for wealth preservation policy solutions — fewer immigration regulations, more corporate intellectual property and patent rights, lower taxes for executives — that disproportionately benefit the wealthy tech capitalist sector in Canada. If their website photo (below) is any indication, the CIC is mostly middle aged, white or Asian male tech CEOs, making this tech lobby an excellent metaphor for Canadian tech’s diversity problem.

The About Page for Council of Canadian Innovators

What Canadian Big Tech doesn’t lobby for

The CIC does not spend much of its political capital furthering the rights of everyone in the tech industry. It doesn’t spend time asking for regulation to support affirmative action for underrepresented marginalized communities, through diversity mandates, hiring quotas or accountability measures. It doesn’t spend time asking for regulation to better support unionization for software engineers and designers. It doesn’t spend time arguing for regulation to ensure that women and minority communities are not harassed by white supremacists and online terrorists.

The CIC also doesn’t talk about the negative externalities of innovative Internet products produced by tech companies, like the harmful side effects of social media or potential employment displacement due to automation. There is also no discussion about an innovation strategy that focuses on social spending: arts, care, education, transit, housing, recreation, etc. The CIC is not interested in lowering the costs of physical Internet infrastructure. They are not interested in lowering barriers for female tech workers through improved child care funding or gender pay equity. There is nothing around restorative justice for historically oppressed communities who are systematically left out of the digital revolution, either as producers or consumers.

Canadian Big Tech won’t save everyone from American Big Tech.

In the short term, a strategic alliance between Canadian technology workers — designers, developers, engineers, analysts, project managers, product managers, marketers, customer support workers and others — with the Canadian tech lobby on selective issues of alignment may be necessary to fend off the threat of Google and Facebook invading our core government services, influencing our democratic elections and surveilling our residents in ways that harm public and individual safety.

In the long term though, it should be apparent that neither the CIC nor Canada’s Big Tech companies are actors working in the broader interests of tech workers or the public good. That actor will only appear through a broad, democratically built coalition of tech workers, activists, unionists, policy makers, politicians, lawyers and other tech literate folks willing to advocate for a more safe, more diverse, more inclusive, more decolonized tech industry that uses its knowledge and skill for more than just a pay cheque.

Despite his enormous wealth and privilege, Jim Balsille has always stayed publicly silent on important ethical issues in technology. This speaks volumes for what his real priorities are for Canadians working in technology. The interests of Balsille and his Canadian tech lobby are narrow and self-involved, and both Canadian media and tech workers would be wise to seek out alternate points of view as new stories break in the coming months about regulating American Big Tech.