Natasha Bulowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada's National Observer

Ottawa plans to embed 50 corporate leaders in key government roles after adopting a business group’s proposal — even naming the program after them, a briefing note reveals.

Build Canada, funded by major Canadian tech and industry players, proposed changes to a federal program that would quickly embed 50 business executives in the federal public service to “improve the governments’ technical capabilities to accelerate AI adoption, strengthen defence capabilities, improve strategic procurement, negotiate optimal trade agreements and more,” according to the policy brief. In short order, the federal government gave the group exactly what it asked for and named the revamped program: Build Canada Exchange. 

The Tyee reported in February that some Build Canada supporters have voiced support for celebrity investor Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which brazenly cut critical government services, laid off nuclear safety and weapons staff, slashed health research funding and accessed sensitive government data, to name a few of the many headline-generating incidents. Build Canada is also connected to a website that looks similar to DOGE, called “Canada Spends.”

This move raises serious questions about what companies are after, as well as the security of Canadians’ data, say unions and other observers. 

“The government needs to consider whether the interchange program does not constitute a serious conflict of interest and must make Canadians aware of what measures will be taken to ensure that Canada’s public service, as well as Canadians’ data and information, are not exploited for commercial gain by the tech sector,” Simon Enoch, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, told Canada’s National Observer. 

“These aren’t charities. They’re not altruistic organizations. Why would a tech company want to allow their employees to work for the government and pay 100 per cent of their salary and benefits?” Enoch said. 

“My first sort of inkling here is that they want intimate knowledge of government operations and the systems they are using so they can come back and pitch their own products and services to the government.” 

But Dan Kelly, CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, supports the move “to bring in fresh ideas and energy from the private sector.”

“Ensuring the views of entrepreneurs and startups are included will be important to ensuring any advice does not just lean into the perspectives of giant multinationals,” Kelly wrote in an emailed statement to Canada’s National Observer. 

The federal government’s assessment of Build Canada’s proposal — including risks and opportunities — was entirely redacted from the briefing note. But it appears that the federal government decided the opportunities outweighed any risks because Budget 2025 included a few sentences promising to integrate 50 external leaders in technology, finance, science and other sectors into the public service, with no other details provided.

Build Canada’s publicly available policy brief was picked up by the federal government and put in a briefing note to the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, which Canada’s National Observer obtained through an access-to-information request. The memo pitched changes to a federal program called Interchange Canada that provides temporary work assignments within different federal departments or outside organizations.

Build Canada was founded last winter with backing from a slew of prominent tech CEOs, including Daniel Debow, co-founder of Rypple and an ex-Shopify vice president. 

The group’s members publish policy memos, including “Make Canadian Government Services AI-First” and “Canada Cannot Afford to Miss Out on Stablecoins.” Tech billionaire and shopify CEO Tobias Lütke is a supporter and author, as is Adam Waterous, investment banker and CEO of Strathcona Resources who recently told CBC News he aims to more than double the company’s crude oil production by 2035.

Build Canada CEO Lucy Hargreaves said she and many entrepreneurs in her network feel “a real patriotic duty to contribute,” especially in areas such as AI, procurement and deploying software where “there’s clearly a need” for expertise.

Hargreaves and Build Canada’s website both state that the organization is “not a lobby group.” In an interview with Canada’s National Observer, Hargreaves emphasized that the group does not send its policy briefs to the government, but just posts them publicly, hoping they get picked up — just as this one was.

The new federal program already has a branding problem, Enoch said.

“Branding it after ‘Build Canada,’ a group that has praised Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts and publicly called for the mass elimination of public sector jobs through the use of artificial intelligence, shows a profound lack of judgment that will no doubt severely impact morale in Canada’s civil service, as well as cause alarm among citizens who rely on the routine and secure delivery of essential government services,” Enoch said.

Build Canada wants these 50 “senior technical leaders” brought into key public sector roles for one- to two-year terms — within departments that include Public Services and Procurement Canada, Innovation, Science and Economic Development and the Treasury Board Secretariat — with a goal of scaling up to 500 placements depending on the results. 

Build Canada also said private companies would pay 100 per cent of these individuals’ salaries, which is generally how the program operates: participants remain employees of and subject to the conditions of their home organization and receive the same salary, which is typically reimbursed by the home organization.

Andrew Graham, Build Canada contributor and CEO of Borrowell, wrote in this “moment of crisis” Canadian corporate leaders and firms “must do their part,” hearkening back to the Second World War when hundreds of Canada’s top industrial leaders — referred to as “Dollar-a-Year Men” — devoted their time and expertise free of charge to the war effort. Being offered the chance to do this work “will be an excellent benefit and a source of pride” for experts selected to share their knowledge in the federal service, Graham wrote.

Union researcher John Anderson pushed back against this comparison. 

“This is not the war against Nazi Germany,” said Anderson, who studies AI for the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), in a phone interview with Canada’s National Observer.

“We have major problems, but they’re not the same thing,” he said. Back then, when they “desperately needed to bring people in,” it was because the federal government was small and resource poor. The situation is very different now: “We have, like, 25,000 IT people who work for the federal government, many of whom work on artificial intelligence,” Anderson said. 

“If we need talented people in a certain area that we don’t have already amongst our over 300,000 federal government civil servants … then we should hire new people on a permanent basis or on a contractual basis to do the work,” Anderson said.

Kelly, CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, disagrees.

“I can think of many times over the past decade where policies, programs and practices failed as the public sector had nearly zero understanding of the realities outside of government itself,” Kelly said in his emailed statement. 

In Kelly’s view, as long as there are “appropriate safeguards,” there’s nothing wrong with bringing in the private sector, but he believes this expertise must come from people in different sectors and companies large and small.

The push to integrate private sector leaders is also setting off alarm bells at two public sector unions.

“Government modernization should not come at the expense of a strong and stable public service. Rather than relying on private sector secondments, this government should invest in training and upskilling public service workers,” a spokesperson for the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) said in an emailed statement to Canada’s National Observer.

“The public service is not a business. It is a democratic institution that serves Canadians, not shareholders. Any private sector integration would need to safeguard the public interest. Incorporating private sector staff creates risks to capacity, accountability and federal workers’ rights,” the statement said. 

The federal government needs to protect long-term public service expertise and, above all, this kind of program should not replace union jobs, the spokesperson added.

It is also troubling that there is no detail about whether or how Canadians’ data would be protected and what access private actors would have to it, Enoch said, adding that data is “the most lucrative currency” in the tech world. AI learns off data from the internet, the quality of which varies widely depending on the source. Government data is considered the gold standard, so tech companies are “drooling” to get their hands on it, particularly government health data, he added — and these changes could potentially give them access to it.

Enoch is not surprised that Carney implemented Build Canada’s proposal.

Carney has been “courting” the tech community with initiatives like the federal government’s AI strategy in an effort to repair the rift that developed under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, so allowing a program like this is in keeping with his overall stance, Enoch said.

Anderson, PIPSC’s AI researcher, said there’s nothing wrong with hiring from the private sector, but he questioned the efficiency of working for only one or two years on a long-term project. 

The memo calls for the government to establish a dedicated program office within the Privy Council Office that can actively recruit from Canadian corporations and streamline the hiring process by expediting security clearances, bypassing standard HR procedures, and providing immediate workspace and technology access for incoming participants. This isn’t mentioned in the budget, but if this is the intent, that is “very questionable,” Anderson said.

“We cannot take away the fact that many of these security protections are for individuals, for privacy … for Canadian ownership, for Canadian control,” he said. “We can’t just throw out everything,” he added, gesturing to DOGE’s widespread impact in the US. 

The policy memo acknowledges that Canadians may not trust private sector employees to act in the public interest rather than their company’s interests, and suggests these experts will be accountable to “government goals, not corporate profits” and abide by ethics and conflict of interest guidelines. 

This does little to assuage Anderson and Enoch’s concerns.

“They’re interested in maximizing profit for their private companies. That’s normal, but that’s not what we’re interested in,” Anderson said, while Enoch emphasized that “we have to think about what’s in it for them.”

Anderson also thinks the potential benefit of the interchange program is “totally exaggerated,” and a “hyped-up” solution because 50 individuals from the private sector — no matter how talented — are not going to change Canada’s major problems overnight. 

“If it were so easy for the private sector to solve them, then we wouldn’t have a housing crisis in Canada, because the private sector would already have solved it,” he said.

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