Canadian Companies and Hoot Suite, Roshel, Pattison and ICE

Activists are urging BC billionaire Jim Pattison — Canada's fifth-richest person — not to sell a warehouse his company owns in Virginia to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for use as a detention centre. 

Last Thursday, officials from Hanover County, VA said they had received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for ICE, about purchasing the 17.6 hectare property, the Lewiston 95 Logistics Centre, "in support of ICE operations." 

Nestled between an Amazon sorting centre, a door manufacturer and a wine supply store, the property is owned by Jim Pattison Developments, one of the companies under the BC business giant's empire. Hanover County has assessed the property to be worth about US$11 million. 

Pattison's other business ventures include a suite of grocery chains across western Canada such as Save-on-Foods and Nester's Market, dozens of car dealerships and major fishing conglomerate CANFISCO. 

The potential sale comes as ICE agents have spent months sowing terror across the US, most recently in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where they have killed two US citizens: Renee Good on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti on Jan 24. ICE agents have also brutally attacked local residents protesting the agency's actions and trying to protect their immigrant neighbours, using tear gas, flashbang grenades and pepper spray on a daily basis.

While ICE isn't prowling Canadian streets, many in the country are outraged by the agency's actions — and the support it receives from Canadian businesses.  "It's definitely a time of rupture,"said Emily Lowan, the BC Green Party leader. Soon after US outlets started reporting about the possible sale, she posted about Pattison's potential sale to ICE on Bluesky and Instagram, and called for people to boycott his supermarkets if they can. 

Those posts had well over a million views on Monday morning, she told Canada's National Observer.

"[ICE's] atrocities have forced the attention of people who are otherwise quite politically neutral," she said. "They're being activated by this issue. It's time to connect the dots [about] how the billionaire class is making life harder for us all, whether it's affordability or our very lives." 

The situation south of the border is raising a separate one in Canada: Lowen has heard from people across the province who would like to boycott Pattison's grocery stores, but can't because they are the only option available in some smaller towns. And a fast-growing number of Canadians are struggling financially as food and other costs soar relative to wages. 

"This has highlighted the issue of this handful of billionaires having an effective monopoly on our food supply in Canada," she said. She would like to see a stronger push towards publicly-owned grocery stores — a model advocates say could reduce food prices for consumers by about 25 per cent — and stronger measures by Ottawa to reduce Canada's record-breaking wealth and income gap. 

Connections to ICE have been a toxic asset for Canadian businesses of late.

Last week, Business in Vancouver reported that Hootsuite, the Vancouver-based social media managing website, has procurement contracts with DHS worth US$27 million. The company's founder Ryan Holmes, who is still on the board, is estimated to be worth US $215 million. 

On Monday, The Logic reported that JSI, a Canadian firm that has received $1 million from the federal government, has been working with ICE to provide wiretapping tools. 

In December, CBC reported that Roshel, a Brampton, ON armoured vehicle manufacturer received about US$7.3 million from ICE for 20 armoured vehicles "to support agents in the field." Founder Roman Shimonov started the company when he immigrated to Canada after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces and last year was celebrated as Canada's defense executive of the year. 

Tanner Mirrless, a political economist at Ontario Tech University, highlighted in an email to Canada's National Observer that Canadian businesses should take a lesson from Carney's Davos speech, where he called on "middle powers" like Canada not to abandon liberal values under pressure from larger nations like the US. 

"When the wealthiest Canadians and their firms materially support ICE’s operations through deals like this — selling warehouses for ICE's ‘processing’ humans, selling social media support for ICE's disinformation, selling trucks for ICE's descent upon cities—they not only go along to get along with the absolute worst of what America has become but do so because it profits them," he wrote. 

"The stakes for democracy and human rights are simply too high for firms to continue going along like this … there is no pressure or obligation for any Canadian company — the Pattison Group, Hootsuite, or others — to cut deals with ICE; it is both an economic choice and a political one. When companies make this choice, they give material support to what is happening in the United States.”