This article is being co-published with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been on a rampage inside the U.S. federal government, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers, dismantling programs that provide people with life-saving vaccines and sparking nationwide protests amid steep cuts to the Department of Housing, Social Security and other arms of government that help keep the country functioning.

Across the border in Canada, leading conservative voices and representatives from major tech and fossil fuel companies see much they admire. They believe the country should do its own version of DOGE, and they see potential for Pierre Poilievre, should the Conservative leader who draws frequent comparisons to Trump win Canada’s election on April 28, to actually move faster than Musk in eviscerating the federal bureaucracy.

“There’s no reason why we can’t move more quickly,” declared Ian Brodie, a University of Calgary professor who was chief of staff to former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, at the Canada Strong and Free Network Conference, a gathering of conservative movement leaders and allies in Ottawa this month.

Poilievre, who polls suggest is running in a close second behind Liberal leader and current prime minister Mark Carney, released a party platform this week promising to “trim bloated bureaucracy,” along with $75 billion in tax cuts. He said his government could cut 17,000 federal government jobs annually through attrition and “without mass layoffs.” 

Brodie’s statement came from audio obtained of him speaking on a panel that included an executive from pipeline company TC Energy, a representative of Amazon Web Services, and a senior fellow at a libertarian think tank called the Macdonald Laurier Institute (MLI), which is part of a Virginia-based global coalition of free-market groups known as Atlas Network.

Together, they discussed how a Poilievre government could unleash a DOGE-like assault in Ottawa while neutralizing political opposition, with Tim Sargent of MLI predicting that the federal cuts will come so fast and hard that critics “won’t know which way to look.”

Yana Lukasheh, senior principal in public policy at Amazon Web Services Canada, imagined Canada’s tech sector supplying “cloud-based” programs that could guide federal cuts, helping provide “the cover that you need to move forward and execute a lot of these initiatives.”

All this could have obvious benefits for corporate Canada. “I hope everyone in this room would agree taxes on people and businesses are way, way, too high,” Sargent argued. “The administrative state just has a stranglehold on business in Canada.” 

Learning from Trump in Canada

The Canada Strong and Free Network Conference has long been regarded as the premiere annual meet-up for the country’s conservative movement. Though Poilievre didn’t appear at this year’s event, it has close ties to his Conservative Party.

The previous president of Canada Strong and Free is Jamil Jivani, now a Conservative Parliament member who’s considered a top political ally of Poilievre and reportedly “best friends” with U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

At this year’s event in Ottawa, Brodie appeared on a panel entitled “Government Waste and Finding Efficiencies,” which was moderated by Dave Forestall, an executive at TC Energy, the company behind the aborted attempt to build Keystone XL, a hotly contested pipeline that would have stretched from Canada’s oil sands to refineries on the Texas gulf coast.

“Obviously we’ve seen the work of DOGE south of the border,” Forestall said. “What would the incoming prime minister and his political staff need to do if they wanted to move quickly to reduce the size of government?”

Brodie replied with concrete instructions. “My advice is in week one, you need to get the Privy Council office under control, downsize to a more effective team of people,” he said, referring to the agency that provides advice and support to the prime minister. “And then in week two, get your ministerial and deputy minister team under control and give them the targets and let them run.” 

He argued that Canada has advantages over the United States in terms of slashing the federal workforce, given that the country’s cabinet has more leeway in making cuts compared to the U.S.

“The good thing compared to the United States is that for all sorts of constitutional legal reasons, the impediments to DOGE moving quickly, we don’t really have to worry about in Canada,” he said. 

That’s important, according to Brodie, because newly elected governments have a higher tolerance for causing public outcry. “The earlier the mandate that you move on this sort of stuff, the more political pain cabinet is willing to absorb,” he said.

How to Neutralize Opponents

During the panel, Forestall from TC Energy pondered how to deal with civil society groups that receive federal government funding and might be hostile to a Canadian DOGE effort. “They tend to be almost exclusively anti-growth in their mindset, anti-development, anti-building anything at all,” he said.

Sargent, the senior fellow at MLI, argued the best way to deal with opponents is to overwhelm them. “We could sit down with a list this afternoon. And we could come up with $20 billion of cuts. Just like that,” he said. “So how do you manage the politics?”

He went on, “you cut these groups at the same time as you’re doing all kinds of other policy changes that they’re going to dislike. So they won’t know which way to look. You’re pursuing a whole kind of big agenda.”

Then there’s the matter of dealing with pushback from within the federal government. “We have a public service union that is resistant to change and risk averse,” said Amazon’s Lukasheh.

But she speculated that cloud-based government spending technology would help in removing political roadblocks. “Imagine a scenario where a minister has an iPad or a dashboard in front of him looking at all the programs that exist in the department, what is under-leveraged, what’s over-subscribed, how much money is going to each program,” she said.

“And then you’re able to give yourself that political cover as well,” she added, “because when you’re justifying certain policies that you are principled on, you have the hard data that is present to back it up.”

The pipeline company executive offered another example that could guide a Poilievre government should the Conservative Party defeat the current Liberal prime minister Carney — Javier Milei. The far-right president of Argentina, widely seen as an inspiration for DOGE, has fired tens of thousands of employees and slashed federal programs, helping drive up the poverty rate and pushing the country deeper into a recession.

“So, you know, Milei in Argentina has been very successful at… taking the chainsaw and eliminating things altogether,” Forestall said. Making large decisive cuts to government all at once is definitely the way to proceed in Canada, he added. “Because if you just chip away at it, one year later, it’s all back to where you started,” he said.

‘Poilievre Needs to Be the One Leading’

The panel provides yet more evidence that the popularity of Musk’s fiscal onslaught is growing among conservatives and corporate executives — even as public opposition intensifies. Dozens of U.S. states appear to be moving forward with some version of DOGE, an effort encouraged by the hardline corporate policy group American Legislative Exchange Council.

In Canada, a coalition of tech leaders known as Build Canada last month launched a website to track government spending that contained many similarities to Musk’s effort. But in a potential sign of how toxic these extreme austerity measures are becoming, the website stressed that “We’re not copying the DOGE playbook from the U.S.”

Yet it seems that if Poilievre wins the election next week, he’ll have the backing of powerful corporate interests along with a committed conservative base to inflict chaos within the Canadian government.

“Pierre Poilievre needs to start talking about forming a DOGE in Canada,” a right-wing YouTuber known as The Pleb Reporter, who is a fixture at Poilieivre’s campaign rallies, has posted on X. “Every single Canadian I talk to agrees our Government blows our money recklessly. We need a concrete plan to cut all the waste. And Pierre Poilievre needs to be the one leading this movement in Canada.”

His post so far has more than 10 thousands likes.