Quote:
Originally Posted by Firebot
Liberals announces legislation for their new digital services tax, promised back in 2020, causing tensions with the Biden administration who vehemently opposes this tax and where they are disappointed. Canadians are expected to pay more for digital services as a result and the tax will cause additional economic tension with the US.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/dig...tion-1.7042662
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/poli...tawas-digital/
The new Liberal-Bloc Quebecois coalition just voted down a conservative motion demanding Senate pass farmers’ carbon tax exemption bill C-234, currently stuck in senate hell in a previously mentioned article, to avoid the optics of having a carve out on carbon tax after specifically stating there will be no more carve outs on carbon tax, outside of the carve out that gave preferential tax treatment to Liberal friendly Atlantic Canada. This will continue to put pressure on food prices while the Ontario Federal of Agriculture pleads to get this bill passed to help farmers. To their credit the NDP voted with the conservatives as they also did initially on the original bill to help Canadians.
https://globalnews.ca/news/10132180/...vative-motion/
https://ofa.on.ca/ofa-encourages-pas...ate-of-canada/
But yeah! Take that Milhouse! |
2 more questions.
The digital services tax is an interesting one- Let me again ask what PP's proposal to deal with this expanding taxation and trade issue is? Why should the US government profit off of canadian citizens? Why shouldn't digital services provided within Canada be taxed as all other services provided in Canada are? Wouldn't this confer a specific advantage to American companies offering digital services in Canada?
Further, the US does seem to be making a lot of noise about this issue, when it seems to me VERY similar but in reverse to the most long standing trade dispute between our nations: softwood lumber. Maybe the US should abide by the WTO findings and then we can be more generous in our trade relationship. We get squished too often by sleeping in bed with the elephant. Sometimes we need to make a bit of noise so they don't crush us completely.
The point here is that this single issue can't impact the trade relationship between our two great nations more than other longstanding issues that have existed through multiple free trade agreements. Our relationship goes beyond this, so making that a locus point for attack is dumb.
The second issue you outlined is definitely a PP loss. Why couldn't he get the block on board politically? That's a failure of leadership, or getting outplayed by a better offer from the liberals. The block is doing what it thinks will get it votes; your positioning of credit to the ndp (and inference of shame upon the Bloc) is infantile. If PP was savvy enough and had enough cred, he may have toppled the government by offering something to the bloc. Of course, in that event the NDP would have crawled back to the libs because they have no interest in seeing an election today. It should be telling that Stephane Dion was able to pull this type of maneuver off 15 years ago, yet PP was not.