U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday he’s terminating all trade discussions with Canada effective immediately.
“We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period,” Trump said in a social media post.
He says he’s pulling back from the bilateral trade discussions because Canada plans to move ahead with its digital services tax (DST), which requires web giants pay a special tax.
Set to take effect on June 30, the DST requires U.S. companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber and Airbnb pay a three per cent levy on revenue from Canadian users — a policy enacted by former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government that the Parliamentary Budget Office projects will bring in billions of dollars in revenue.
hah, imagine companies asking customers for taxes back from 2022
You know this is not how it works, yes?
I mean it doesn’t stop companies trying to comply with the law the worst way possible
It is a corporation tax, not the sales tax.
They are using the turnover to estimate tax liability because taxing profits achieved in a single country by digital multinationals is bordering on impossible (and too easy to avoid).
Yup. Companies avoid paying taxes in one country by getting their divisions in other, lower tax countries to charge the one in the high tax country so much for intellectual property and branding etc that they make a loss in the high tax country, which in some countries entitles them to a tax rebate. It’s insane.
Which is why most of the multinationals should be taxed on turnover in a country taxing them.
Yes and no. Companies will always try to pass expenses like tax onto their customers. My guess is they will increase rates on customers significantly to recover some of those unexpected retroactive costs in the near term with the side effect of increasing revenue above the 3% tax in the long term.