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Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives at a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, December 12, 2016.
Digital services tax brawl?
Last week, the Trudeau government enacted a digital services tax that has been in the works for years — and the US is ready to retaliate. The tax promises big money for the feds, with billions in revenue expected from big tech companies that earn more than CA$1.1 billion a year.
Canada had hoped to convince its peer countries in the OECD to follow suit on the same timeline — what Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland called the “multilateral solution” — but that hasn’t happened. At least not yet.
The US, which wants to wait on imposing any such tax, is threatening to respond to the policy. The country’s ambassador to Canada, David Cohen, labeled the tax “discriminatory,” and trade representative Katherine Tai is looking at options in response, which might include action under the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement.
Canada is already staring down a 2026 USMCA review, which could prove a rocky undertaking if Donald Trump wins in November. The former president has promised a global import tariff if he’s returned to the White House, which may or may not apply to Canada. The Trump campaign hasn’t clarified the scope of the policy. In March, Tai warned Canada not to get “too comfortable” with the free-trade status quo, which might be heading for upheaval, potentially alongside some punishment for Canada’s unilateral digital services tax.
A herd of cows standing on top of a lush green field.
Hard Numbers: Danes tax cow farts, SCOTUS sides with Biden (on social), Deadly mpox strain hits DRC, China’s lunar probe returns
6-3: In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with the Biden administration in a dispute with Republican-led states over how far the government can go to combat misinformation on social media when it comes to topics like COVID-19 and election security. The case stemmed from administration efforts to have platforms remove posts that touched on issues like COVID vaccines and election fraud.
8,000: There have been nearly 8,000 cases of a new strain of mpox, aka monkeypox, this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including 384 deaths – almost half of which were children under 15. The virus, which can cause lesions across the whole body, has been spreading at a worrying rate, risking cross-border and international spread of the virus.
4.5 billion: China’s lunar probe has returned to Earth with the first-ever samples from the unexplored far side of the moon. The Chang’e-6 landed in the Inner Mongolia desert on Tuesday after a nearly two-month mission that was fraught with risk. Scientists hope the samples will help test theories about how the moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago and whether it resulted from a collision with a very early version of Earth.