The wild thing is that Canada is absolutely not alone in having this sort of insanely restrictive land use regulatory environment, as you hear similar stories from the UK (see: Clarkson's Farm) and even the USA (see: restrictive SF zoning). So the question for me is how the USA and other countries with similar regulatory regimes do well in spite of these things.

With the USA a possible answer is that the scale and diversity of the market adds more competition (ie. low regulatory areas) that Canada doesn't have.

Or it's possible that all these countries have awful zoning but while this is awful the factors that make tech a success in the USA are unrelated and dominate this (eg. unmatched wealth and financing)