Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦

basically equal parts tech, fitness, and coffee at this point

[Eric Lombardi (EricForOLP.ca) 🇨🇦🚀 @EricDLombardi]

Most politicians aren’t honest about our housing system disaster, because the truth is hard.

For housing to be affordable again, prices need to fall.

That’s exactly what federal and provincial governments bailing out big condo developers are trying to stop.

And I get it!

- - -

Falling home prices means many businesses, people, seniors, and families will lose wealth in real estate.

But it’s unavoidable.

Anyone saying otherwise is lying and has no intention of fixing things.

By 2035, I want price-to-income ratios for housing in Ontario fall to 5:1, which is considered “balanced” (see chart).

I would also like to see the price of market rents for 3B fall to under 30% of family income.

By being honest about this, I can also speak to the “losers” of change, promise help those who need it through the affordability transition, and ultimately enable greater economic confidence.

It’s also worth saying that maintaining “flat” prices with rising incomes won’t work for two reasons:

First, because it will take 30 years if not longer to restore true affordability.

Second, because the high cost of housing has undermined our productive economy and its ability to generate income growth in the first place.

- - -

For 30 years, municipal, provincial, and federal governments, progressive, Liberal, and Conservative, have mismanaged our housing system.

It was not a partisan failure, but a failure of last generation’s political class to uphold the bargain of an attainable middle class life for the next one.

I’m not running for Ontario Liberal Leader to defend these failures, but to acknowledge them and then offer a real path forward.

I have 5 priorities:

1) Fix our housing supply system through land use, permitting, and building code reform.

2) Abolish taxes on new housing (and moving) while repairing municipal finance by making cities more than whole.

- - - 1 & 2 can lower the cost of building new homes by 30% or more. It will get industry building again and produce better quality housing. - - -

3) Help young people buy homes earlier in life (ideally before 30) so they start families earlier. Yes, these ideas will boost demand.

4) Prevent downward mobility and financial entrapment for middle and working class homeowners, families, and seniors because of falling prices. These are the people governments should help (not big developers).

5) Invest in non-market housing to prevent at-risk Ontarians from ending up homeless and to help the very sick people we’ve allowed to become homeless get the care and treatment they deserve.

[Build Canada @build_canada]

You've likely seen the headlines from bills C-34, C-36, and C-22 in the media.

Each may sound reasonable on their own: protect kids online, modernize privacy, help police catch criminals.

But buried within is an emerging Digital Regulatory Superpower unlike anything Canadians have ever seen.

These bills hand one unelected commission power over what Canadians can say, what stays private, and who the state can watch.

As of today, the Federal Government is rushing to enact massive Internet Surveillance Reform into law without proper debate.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

This is the point. Same will happen in all countries that will make social media age restrictions. “Won’t someone think of the children” is usually not about the children

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did.

And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves.

One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults.

Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life.

If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever.

Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen.

Alternatively

There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all.

To start -
If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers.

It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail)

Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability.

Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up

But

They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks

Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Beautiful 27km ride for breakfast 🚴‍♂️

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Facts

[Sal Di Stefano @mindpumpsal]

Seeing politicians up in arms over a genuine entrepreneur who creates massive innovation and who employs thousands of people is crazy.

Politicians get rich from bringing zero value. If anyone deserves nothing it’s them.

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Well said

[tobi lutke @tobi]

* Correct quote is “politically left” not socialist. Point stands. Entrepreneurs take potential and turn it into value that’s added to the global GDP. They capture a small amount of that value in the process which is a big part of the incentive. The rest goes to others, employees, shareholders, government, suppliers etc.

You can always criticize them. You can always criticize the redistribution efforts. But you should always remember that without them, there is very little new value enters society and that locks everyone in zero sum competition, sometimes war.

Entrepreneurs are load bearing for human thriving. It’s a glorious act to put yourself out there and build a company that provides good and services to everyone. And Elon is the best entrepreneur that ever was. You don’t have to like him, and sure he’s crazy, but otherwise he wouldn’t do crazy things. Same coin, two sides.

[Harley Finkelstein @harleyf]

You don’t have to love Elon Musk to recognize what this headline says about us.

A country that spends more time criticizing wealth creation than encouraging it sends a clear message to builders: your success is tolerated, not celebrated.

Canada should be the best place in the world to build ambitious companies. Headlines like this make us look like we’re not quite ready for that.

[Lucy Hargreaves @lucyhargreaves4]

Canada’s not going for gold with this strategy.

On the consumer side, this strategy gets a lot of things right and this government deserves credit for that.

But from a digital and economic sovereignty perspective I think it falls short. What the AI industry most needs is for governments to create the free market conditions for AI companies to start, scale and thrive here.

There are important elements in the strategy: sovereign compute, a public supercomputer, AI Missions starting in health care, a fund to scale Canadian champions, commercializing the Photonics Fabrication Centre, and the government as an anchor customer. Members of the Build Canada community have publicly written about many of these ideas and it's good to see these show up in the plan.

But we have to be honest about what this strategy is – and what it isn't.

This is primarily a strategy to help Canada use artificial intelligence, with government in a main character role in framing public perception.

It is not a strategy to make Canada the best place on earth to build it. Its own organizing goal – adoption, moving Canadian businesses from 12% to 60% uptake – is necessary but not sufficient to make Canada a global AI leader.

The strategy says it wants Canadian champions. But you don't build champions with government cheques and deferred studies – you build them by making Canada the best place on earth to start and scale a company.

Using AI and Building AI are different goals, and they require different instincts.

The companies that will define this century will get built where four things are true:
1. founders and engineers keep what they create;
2. capital is deep enough to write billion-dollar cheques; 3. energy and compute are cheap and fast to build; and 4. the rules are light enough to move at the speed of the technology.

Measure this strategy against those conditions and the pattern is clear:

On founder and employee economics – the single biggest reason talent leaves Canada – it does nothing now. The one capital-gains idea it raises, a reinvestment rollover, is deferred to a study due by Budget 2026.

On capital, it makes the government the venture capitalist instead of unleashing private capital to back Canadian companies.

On energy, it promises to double the grid by 2050. The build is needed this decade – and the strategy offers no permitting reform to get there.

On regulation, it adds a new layer – a trusted-AI certification program, watermarking, plus new privacy and online-safety laws – and compliance always lands hardest on the startups least able to carry it.

And it adds a dozen new programs on top of the 130-plus innovation programs founders already can't navigate. The answer was always fewer and faster, not more.

Prosperity is not something that the state can spend into existence. Prosperity is what happens when you clear the runway and let the free market work. No government can subsidize its way past the friction it is responsible for creating.

Playing to win would look different. It would look like:

--> Let founders defer capital gains reinvested in Canadian companies, and fix how we tax employee equity – now, not in a future budget.
--> Treat energy and permitting like the emergency they are. Approve power and data centres in months, not years, and build at wartime speed.
--> Set a hard speed limit on regulation: apply the laws we have, and clear new products fast.
--> Collapse the ~130-plus innovation programs into fewer than ten – and cut the friction founders hit at every step.

Canada invented modern AI. We have the talent, one of the cleanest grids in the world, and the research base to win. The opportunity is ours to lose.

This strategy is a genuine start – but a country that wants to win doesn't plan to be the world's best customer. It plans to build the companies the world cannot live without.

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Solid thread. 10/10 agree with all, covers all the bases simply

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

I'm 46.

These are 5 stretches I do every day to feel like I'm 26:

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

@X Thanks for letting me know

[Lucy Hargreaves @lucyhargreaves4]

every forecast had this quarter pegged as the rebound. ottawa projected +1.4%. rbc and td both said +1.7%. q4 was the dip, q1 was supposed to be the recovery.
we got roughly zero growth

yes, this is a technical recession but
the longer pattern is what really matters and what concerns me most

real gdp per person grew 0.6% in all of 2025. it fell in 2024. it fell in 2023.

we haven’t become richer per person in years, and it’s crazy to me that we keep acting surprised when our growth is stalled

we have fundamental productivity and investment problems that won’t fix themselves

I will sound like I’m beating a dead horse here, but worth repeating again… we know what we need to do to fix this:

1. make capital gains and corporate tax rates at least as good with the US, if not materially better. across all industries.

2. open up protected markets to competition (telecoms, finance, dairy, transportation etc)

3. rapidly reduce bureaucratic red tape and slow process across the board, not just for favoured projects or sectors

and finally, let’s all remind ourselves that we can just do things. every Canadian can be part of fixing this. we can collectively hustle - aim high

Canada can be the richest country in the world, if we choose to be

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Nice, pulled my back lifting dumbbells at the gym…wonder if I can get a seniors discount now

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Shocking.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: Amazon has reportedly scrapped its internal AI leaderboard as costs soared, with a senior executive telling staff: “don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

It was always going to 7, but SGA needs to be SGA.

OKC in 7

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Gave the personal site a much needed facelift

[Build Canada @build_canada]

COO of Uber @andrewgordonmac shouts out our Outcomes Tracker yesterday at #TorontoTechWeek Homecoming when discussing Federal Government efficiency. 🇨🇦

"I think the accountability tracker that Build Canada has built is amazing, and if you haven't checked this out you you should look at it... I and I check it regularly".

Excellence in government is necessary now more than ever, and it's possible if we demand it.

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Finally started playing with Claude design and comparing to codex to give my personal site a much needed facelift. So far, for my taste, I think Claude design is going to win for this project

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Well that’s cool, haven’t really posted here in forever, very small account, but 2 days talking about @TOtechweek and got 9 new followers. I guess you really can just do stuff

[Cameron Makarchuk 🇨🇦 @cmakarchuk]

Well said

[Fahd Ananta @fahdananta]

Look, I’m not a die hard Toronto fan. I do think the city is unique and special.

I see all the negativity about Toronto Tech Week though. It makes no sense. It’s okay to enjoy life, life is beautiful. It’s okay to have positive vibes, you don’t have to just be repressed. I personally hate events but this is special to me because we see all the excellence around you. If you miss it, it genuinely is a skill issue.

Nothing is ever perfect. By that same logic some of ya’ll should delete Twitter before you get your bread up.

Lastly, on @skanwar. Man, you guys don’t know how much he does for the love of the game. The guy is a certified G but he’s up at 6am personally running around just to pay it forward. There is excellence everywhere for those with eyes to see.

Here’s a good heuristic. Next time before you complain, ask yourself are you part of the solution. If not then whatever you have to say is kind of irrelevant.

Thank you for all that you do @skanwar. Let me speak at TTW next year 🤐