This hasn't been true for the last couple of years.

source: I was a Shopify employee until today and can confirm my salary was closer to FAANG than not.

this is absolutely not true, I know engineering managers with around 5-7 years of total experience ( aka people under 30 ) making $400,000 CAD in cash compensation at shop. They recently did a cash/equity split where employees could choose their split and not a huge surprise many chose the maximum cash

there are no government engineering positions in Canada paying anywhere close to this

This was partially true at points (though we've always done quite a bit better than government), but categorically stopped being true with: https://news.shopify.com/rewriting-the-story-of-compensation -- now it's pretty competitive.

Totally not true. My Shopify offer was slightly higher than my Google offer (as a re-hire), both base + stocks, about 3 years ago. However, going with Google really paid off because of the stock performance.

They pay competitively now, but it took half the company quitting during covid covid for them to get to that point