Basically, it was a time bomb, introduced by the liberals when they thought there was no possible way they could win this last election… going back retroactive for the last few years and being introduced on July 4th…seriously, July 4th, so that…Poilievre (little did they know) would have to cancel it, and the Libs could scream foul. That’s the short version & it’s in this ball of wax:
Despite the plan being announced more than three years ago, the digital services tax was only recently implemented on July 4th ‘cuz knowing how to read the room, etc... In August, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced that her government had requested dispute settlement consultations through the North American free trade agreement — called CUSMA — over the issue.Bill’s C-10 & C-11. If we aren’t talking about it already, shouldn’t we be?
This whole Bill needs to go into the trash! Do we not already have laws on the books for protecting children, hate crimes et al? If they need to be amended, then do so but the rest can be garbaged. People without children are pushing this.forums.canadiancontent.net
On Sunday the Department of Finance issued a terse circular announcing that the Digital Services Tax announced in 2021 would not, as originally planned, begin to be collected on Monday.
The DST (R.I.P.) was designed to exclusively target Canadian revenues of American “web giants” that provide online services, advertising, or streaming content. As the Finance memo observes, it is being dropped at the last minute in the hope of restarting negotiations with the U.S. on an updated version of continental free trade.
The idea of a DST was framed by the Trudeau government as a moral necessity of the 21st century: something had to be done about foreign vampires like Netflix and Google which had built businesses with millions of Canadian customers out of digital ether, but paid no tax in Canada.
(Everybody recognized, however, that much of the cost of the tax was bound to come out of the pockets of the customers rather than the vampires)
It’s inherently difficult to know how the tax incidence would have worked out, because the process of digital price discovery isn’t especially mature: some of these companies are still figuring out their own optimum, revenue-maximizing price points in plain sight. But from a selfish point of view, Canadian consumers, considered strictly as such, can only feel relief at the sudden abandonment of the DST.
Colby Cosh: Carney's surrender to Trump was inevitable — National Post
Canada shows you really can hit yourself when you go elbows up
From that neoliberal-nerd point of view, Canada went rogue when it announced a homebrewed DST — one that would have had a nasty retroactive effect, that was designed specifically only to collect from large American companies with recognizable names, and that didn’t address double-taxation issues. And let’s recall that Joe Biden was still president when this happened…but it was timed to be implemented retroactively for after the American election.
