Shopify CEO says pensioners are ‘dependents’ who shouldn’t vote — then backed a plan that gives $500K earners 5 votes

Here is what was actually said, what the Charter actually protects and why millions of retirees and pension holders have nothing to fear at the ballot box.

What Shopify CEO Lütke actually proposed

The exchange started when a reply to one of Lütke’s posts floated a tiered voting system tied to income tax paid: $0 in tax means 0 votes, $1 to $100,000 in taxable earnings means 1 vote, $100,000 to C$200,000 means 2 votes and so on, capped at 5 votes for anyone paying tax on $500,000 or more. Lütke replied with two words: ‘Good system’.

Separately, Lütke argued that once a person’s pension is locked in and guaranteed, that person becomes a dependent in the same category as a minor and should no longer be entitled to a vote. He has weighed in on political and cultural debates on his personal account before, including defending Shopify’s decision to keep hosting Breitbart’s online store in 2017.

Why a pension can’t cost you your vote in Canada

The idea makes for a viral post, but it runs directly into section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of the Constitution Act, 1982. Section 3 guarantees every citizen of Canada the right to vote in a federal or provincial election.

That right is unusually well protected. Section 3 is one of the few Charter provisions that Parliament and provincial legislatures cannot override using the notwithstanding clause — the tool governments have used in recent years to pass legislation despite Charter concerns. Tying voting rights to income, taxes paid, or pension status would mean reopening the Constitution itself, not passing an ordinary law.

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How many Canadians this would actually touch

This isn’t an abstract debate. An estimated 6.4 million Canadians were receiving a CPP retirement benefit in 2025, a figure the Chief Actuary of Canada expects to grow to 9.5 million by 2050 as the population ages. Separately, more than 7.2 million Canadians were active members of an employer-registered pension plan in 2023, including 4.9 million in defined benefit plans — the type of pension most often described as locked in and guaranteed.

In other words, any proposal to tie voting rights to pension status would touch a large and fast-growing share of Canadians — precisely the retirees and near-retirees who rely most on predictable, guaranteed income.

Executives weighing in on hot-button political ideas on social media is nothing new, and Lütke has done it for years. What’s different here is the direct implication for retirement income — the idea that collecting a pension could somehow disqualify a Canadian from voting. It can’t, and changing that would take far more than a viral post or even an ordinary act of Parliament. For now, the only thing at stake for Canadian retirees is a headline, not a ballot.