https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/06/30/canadians-react-to-cancelling-digital-services-tax/
Duh. No one elected them to go elbows down. Gonna be a short lived minority.
https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/06/30/canadians-react-to-cancelling-digital-services-tax/
Duh. No one elected them to go elbows down. Gonna be a short lived minority.
I agree with your skepticism on this one.
Especially given what we can see with regards to US tech companies being complicit with a bunch of the authoritarian stuff going on down south, moves to disrupt their monopolies and try and foster a more local industry makes a ton of sense. Many of Carney’s decisions lately align with US interests more so than Canada. It’s not overly surprising, he’s not pro-Canadian companies / people, but pro-business and international trade (at the expense of locals if need be), in a fairly generic neo-liberal way.
Also, bending over right before Canada day is just such a dick thing to do as PM. He should be trying to lead / inspire national pride, not appeasing foreign interests, for at least like 1 week of his term.
Still prolly better than PP would’ve been though. With PP we would’ve had Elon here Musking up the place.
Uhh… Did you reply to the right person/comment? I don’t see how your comment connects to mine here. But I’ll reply to your comment anyway.
I don’t disagree with your comment, but I am definitely a bit more hesitant to label Carney as anything (the word “neoliberal” has so many competing definitions it’s essentially a nothing-burger with only some bad flavour attached to it to make it a punching bag by all sides these days). First off, it’s pretty clear that Trump’s moves are done in favour of the US tech oligarchs, that we can agree on.
Carney’s recent moves have basically burnt through his political capital extremely quickly, though I can’t say all of them align with or benefit the US, not even the pipelines he’s been eager to build, especially cause most of the O&G companies in Alberta are mostly owned by foreign companies (source), not necessarily all by the US. And Carney’s government hasn’t done that much with about 2 months in, but none of them have been pro-international trade per se. Cutting the carbon tax is definitely pro-business but it was done more so to appease the right more broadly than just businesses, though I guess if you consider the fact that O&G companies are mostly foreign-owned, then you might say it’s pro-international-trade, but since we’ve barely decarbonized our economy and society by much (doesn’t help that Ontario and Alberta have such strong conservative provincial governments), and the costs are passed onto consumers anyway (though consumers get that rebate), cutting the carbon tax does essentially nothing for businesses at the expense of consumers. Internal trade barriers is, well, internal, and its consequences can be a toss up for businesses in general: those with the resources to operate across provinces may be able to give smaller players a hard time.
All-in-all, I haven’t seen their other moves as being obtusely against Canadian interests, even if we don’t agree with all of them (eg Bill C-5 and Bill C-2), and even if they hurt Canadians in the long run. That said, the earlier border bill is basically an appeasement, given that it was clearly a cop out issue by Trump. This cutting of the Digital Services Tax is another instance of Carney’s government giving up on a policy that is in the country’s interest to try gain what they think is also in the country’s interest with the US, and ostensibly so. So that’s two, but we’ll still need at least a few more of such instances to see if Carney’s gov is pro-US, cause insofar, these were done to get Trump onto the negotiating table by hurting Canadians a little (privacy on the border bill, and putting back on the threat to our media and online entertainment industry). I would hope we’d actually get something given that the sacrifices have been made, and I’d rather we don’t do what Carney did, but we can’t disregard the fact that there’s a potential gain to be made, even if we don’t like how things are going down, and don’t like how we’re negotiating with a wannabe dictator. We haven’t gotten anything out of it though, so patience with Carney is going to run thin.
And let’s not even talk about PP. Just because he’s not elected and we didn’t immediately get Musk-ed, doesn’t necessarily make me feel any better with how most of Carney’s economic moves have been more conservative than what I think is necessary. For example, he said we should have a good energy mix, but he’s yet to announce or even mention any investment or developments in green energy, or anything that would contribute to a good off-ramp for O&G companies (even if we don’t think they deserve it) and making sure we have a healthy amount of green energy generation, and thus only making it more and more necessary to more extreme measures if we want to save our and our children’s future.
The original commentor’s note seemed to imply Carney was playing some sort of ‘4d chess’ bullshit, dangling keys and then ditching something we’d always intended to ditch as a ‘show’ to appease the orange guy. Your response noted that the tax was put in fairly recently, and was set to kick in officially this month – basically questioning the original guys narrative. You add in the question about wheat, which I’m still not sure where he got that.
So yes, I agree with your skepticism related to this being some fancy political footwork that’s actually in our best interests, and the implication from the OP that we were ditching a tax that we’d never intended to bring in.
Your response even supports the comment that the move is objectively against our interests, and pro-US tech giant. Your optimism and “wait and see, mayyybeee”, are naive. We’ve already conceded that tax, without getting anything in return for it, as well as any other area of internal domestic policy as there’s a clear precedent now – if it were part of negotiations, it would be getting discussed as part of negotiations, setting up an exemption for US companies or whatnot. We just handed them that item on ‘good faith’, with a dictator. Heck, during the election, I’m fairly sure I heard a quote from Carney about how he wouldn’t commit to anything publicly prior to negotiations, because it’s a weak approach where you basically give stuff away - but they did just that in this case.
The questionable bills, and general de-regulation / removal of environmental reviews, are in line with US interests at present, which are backed by tech giants wanting to take more control / have more autonomy. The continued (over) reliance on US tech services is also clearly not in Canada’s best interests, given how the US has been leveraging their near monopolistic status in that realm. Many of our newly elected government officials got in on a promise of standing up to America’s authoritarian bullshit, but once in power have basically complied and made similar authoritarian steps.
In that case, okay, I see where you’re coming from with the previous comment. But yeah, it’s always good to question claims of some 4D-chess-like move a government is doing, cause often times, we’d actually know what’s happened, and so would the party on the other side of the table.
I will also say this to clarify, cause I think it seems like we have different definitions: when I said pro-X, I only meant it in the sense that you actively do things that benefit party X. I noticed that it’s used interchangeably with “action benefits party X,” but context doesn’t always make it clear.
And I’m only saying that calling what we see right now a bend of the knee might still be a bit early given that this is a situation that’s still ongoing. If the events are to stop right now, and we essentially get nothing else on top of getting Trump on the negotiating table, then heck ya it’s a capitulation. You call it optimism, I call it seeing it for what it is putting aside my pessimistic view on it. But yes, I agree that we shouldn’t need to do what Carney did.
This is a very charged take of Bill C-5 and it makes it hard to agree or disagree. Might just be a me-thing, but anytime people use very charged words or takes, I just have the tendency to retort, because while they aren’t possibilities you can disprove, there’s also nothing to prove them. We can entertain the possibility, but I do wonder if we’d just be focusing on the wrong problem and make constructive conversations impossible to make.
Bill C-5 is a lot of nodding and ‘trust me’ type arguments that get made by a liberal party that’s designed the legislation to be ‘reviewed’ after 5 years, meaning its highly likely that it’ll get used by another party - which could happen quite quickly even, given the minority govt status. Also, for its nation building projects clauses, ask yourself whose rights/interests are getting suppressed, and which nation owns the businesses that will be building those projects. It’s generally American owned / head quartered companies, getting assurances that the pesky locals rights won’t get in the way, from our own government. It is quite explicitly selling us out to foreign business interests.
Like even the reactors that Ontario (in partnership with a couple other provinces, I think) is building, are American made from GE and rely on Uranium that we ship down to the USA, they then enrich it and ship it back to us to power those plants. Or the Avro Arrow that Ford trumpets all the time, which was always a concept car / “platform” to sell component contracts to foreign companies. They put cheaper EV’s for everyone in Canada on hold, because Ford wanted to try and appease American car dealers. They’re aggressively pushing things like OpenBanking, even though practically every Canadian financial institution is outsourcing that functionality outside the country (even most “local” CUs now have their websites hosted by an Indian company) – some even “disclose” all their member information to India/US-based AI companies, because I guess there’s a low risk of it being regulated by the Carney govt: he’s very bullish on trusting big tech to be country agnostic, despite countless examples to the contrary. Suppressing privacy rights would be an easy way to green light large government AI integration, particularly with foreign company involvement/control. These things are not nation building, nor are pipelines owned by US interests. But those are the sorts of ‘projects’ that this kind of legislation will most likely target.