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Trudeau’s Digital Services Tax threatens taxpayers and the economy

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From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Author: Jay Goldberg

In other words, Trudeau is imposing a multi-billion-dollar tax on taxpayers – at a time when 50 per cent of Canadians say they’re $200 away from not being able to pay their bills.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau managed to do two terrible things in one fell swoop: raise costs for Canadians at a time they can least afford it and risk a trade war with the United States.

The Trudeau government pushed its new Digital Services Tax through Parliament before quitting for the summer.

The government’s DST targets large foreign companies operating online marketplaces and social media platforms earning revenue from online advertising, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Airbnb. It is a three per cent tax on all revenue these companies generate in Canada.

Two red flags should pop up immediately for taxpayers. First, these companies won’t just eat the tax without passing costs onto consumers. And second, the United States government is sure to retaliate.

On the first point, there were clear signs that prices for Canadian consumers would increase because of this tax long before it was passed into law.

When the DST was in its proposal stage, the Parliamentary Budget Officer did an estimate of how much the government’s new tax would cost Canadians.

The PBO estimated the government’s DST would lead to an additional $7.2 billion in federal tax revenue over the next five years.

Where is that money coming from?

While major foreign companies will be the ones paying the tax directly, Canadian consumers will be hit with the bill.

It is “expected that businesses in the targeted sectors will adjust their services and prices in response to the new law,” the PBO said.

In other words, Trudeau is imposing a multi-billion-dollar tax on taxpayers – at a time when 50 per cent of Canadians say they’re $200 away from not being able to pay their bills.

Not only is Trudeau’s new DST going to increase costs for consumers, Canada also risks a trade war with the United States over the tax, which would cost Canadians even more.

In the wake of Trudeau’s DST getting through Parliament, the United States Trade Representative warned the U.S. will “do what’s necessary” to respond to the Trudeau’s new tax. USTR Katharine Tai warns she will look at “all available tools” as part of the U.S. response.

Tai’s isn’t the only voice in the U.S. calling for retaliatory action.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association, which represents tech companies like Amazon, Apple and Uber that will be targeted by Trudeau’s new tax, is calling on the Biden administration to fight back.

“With Canada’s DST now law, the time has come to announce [retaliatory] action,” said the association’s vice president, Jonathan McHale.

The president and CEO of the Tax Foundation is warning that U.S. retaliation would likely come through hiking tariffs on imports from Canada.

Given that the U.S. is by far Canada’s largest trading partner, making it more expensive to get Canadian goods into the American marketplace could have a detrimental impact on Canada’s economy, costing us both economic growth and jobs.

More than two years ago, the USTR warned against the Trudeau government taking measures that “single out American firms for taxation while effectively excluding national firms engaged in similar lines of business.”

But Trudeau chose to ignore those warnings and do exactly that.

To add insult to injury, the law authorizing the Trudeau government to bring the DST into effect (whenever it so chooses) allows it to do so retroactively, all the way back to 2022. Companies could be on the hook for huge sums for tax years in which the law didn’t even exist.

No wonder the Americans are threatening to fight back.

The bottom line is that Trudeau has put Canada in a terrible position. He is risking higher prices for Canadians and tariffs on our exports to the U.S. market, all in a lust for more cash. And the revenue the government is likely to bring in through the DST, an average of $1.4 billion a year, would be spent by this government in just one day.

It’s not too late for Trudeau to back down. Cabinet could choose not to bring the tax into force and avoid retaliation from the US.

For the good of taxpayers and the Canadian economy, Trudeau must abandon the DST.

Business

EU Tightens Social Media Censorship Screw With Upcoming Mandatory “Disinformation” Rules

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From Reclaim The Net

By

This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner.

What started out as the EU’s “voluntary code of practice” concerning “disinformation” – affecting tech/social media companies – is now set to turn into a mandatory code of conduct for the most influential and widely-used ones.

The news was revealed by the Irish media regulator, specifically an official of its digital services, Paul Gordon, who spoke to journalists in Brussels. The EU Commission has yet to confirm that January will be the date when the current code will be “formalized” in this way.

The legislation that would enable the “transition” is the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), which critics often refer to as the “EU online censorship law,” the enforcement of which started in February of this year.

The “voluntary” code is at this time signed by 44 tech companies, and should it become mandatory in January 2025, it will apply to those the EU defines as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) (with at least 45 million monthly active users in the 27-nation bloc).

Currently, the number of such platforms is said to be 25.

In its present form, the DSA’s provisions obligate online platforms to carry out “disinformation”-related risk assessments and reveal what measures they are taking to mitigate any risks revealed by these assessments.

But when the code switches from “voluntary” to mandatory, these obligations will also include other requirements: demonetizing the dissemination of “disinformation”; platforms, civil society groups, and fact-checkers “effectively cooperating” during elections, once again to address “disinformation” – and, “empowering” fact-checkers.

This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner.

The code was first introduced (in its “voluntary” form) in 2022, with Google, Meta, and TikTok among the prominent signatories – while these rules originate from a “strengthened” EU Code of Practice on Disinformation based on the Commission’s Guidance issued in May 2021.

“It is for the signatories to decide which commitments they sign up to and it is their responsibility to ensure the effectiveness of their commitments’ implementation,” the EU said at the time – that would have been the “voluntary” element, while the Commission said the time it had not “endorsed” the code.

It appears the EC is now about to “endorse” the code, and then some – there are active preparations to make it mandatory.

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Brownstone Institute

Jeff Bezos Is Right: Legacy Media Must Self-Reflect

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From the Brownstone Institute

By David ThunderDavid Thunder 

I can count on one hand the times I have seen leaders of media organizations engage in anything that could be described as hard-hitting forms of self-critique in the public square.

One of those times was when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on public record, in a letter to the Republican House Judiciary Committee (dated August 26th, 2024), that he “regretted” bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to censor “certain Covid-19 content.” Another was the almost unprecedented public apology in January 2022 (here’s a report in English) by a Danish newspaper that it had towed the “official” line during the pandemic far too uncritically.

We witnessed a third moment of critical introspection from a media owner the other day, when Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and is the largest shareholder of Amazon, suggested in an op-ed in his own newspaper that legacy media may have themselves at least partly to blame for the loss of public trust in the media.

In this context, he argued that his decision not to authorize the Washington Post to endorse a presidential candidate could be “a meaningful step” toward restoring public trust in the media, by addressing the widespread perception that media organizations are “biased” or not objective.

You don’t need to be a fan of Jeff Bezos, any more than of Mark Zuckerberg, to recognize that it is a good thing that prominent representatives of the financial and political elite of modern societies, whatever their personal flaws and contradictions, at least begin to express doubts about the conduct and values of media organizations. Some truths, no matter how obvious, will not resonate across society until prominent opinion leaders viewed as “safe” or “established,” say them out loud.

Bezos opens his Washington Post op-ed by pointing out that public trust in American media has collapsed in recent generations and is now at an all-time low (a substantial decline can be seen across many European countries as well if you compare the Reuters Digital News Report from 2015 with that of 2023 — for example, Germany sees a drop from 60% to 42% trust and the UK sees a drop from 51% to 33%).

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working…Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

Something we are doing is clearly not working. This is the sort of candid introspection we need to see a lot more of in journalists and media owners. If someone stops trusting you, it’s easy to point the finger at someone else or blame it on “disinformation” or citizen ignoranceIt’s not so easy to make yourself vulnerable and take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror to figure out how you’ve lost their trust.

The owner of the Washington Post does not offer an especially penetrating diagnosis of the problem. However, he does point out some relevant facts that may be worth pondering if we are to come to a deeper understanding of the fact that the Joe Rogan podcast, with an estimated audience of 11 million, now has nearly 20 times CNN’s prime-time audience:

The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the DC metro area.)

More and more, we talk to ourselves. Much of the legacy media has become an ideological echo chamber, as I pointed out in an op-ed in the Irish Times a few years ago. Conversations go back and forth between journalists about things they care about, while a substantial number of ordinary citizens, whose minds are on other things, like paying their mortgage, getting a medical appointment, or worrying about the safety of their streets, switch off.

While there are some notable exceptions, the echo-chamber effect is real and may be part of the explanation for the flight of a growing number of citizens into the arms of alternative media.

The increasing disconnect between self-important legacy journalists and the man and woman on the street has been evidenced by the fact that so-called “populism” was sneered at by many journalists across Europe and North America while gathering serious momentum on the ground.

It was also evidenced by the fact that serious debates over issues like the harms of lockdowns and the problem of illegal immigration, were largely sidelined by many mainstream media across Europe while becoming a catalyst for successful political movements such as the Brothers of Italy, Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, and the Freedom Party in Austria.

Perhaps part of the problem is that those working in well-established media organizations tend to take the moral and intellectual high ground and severely underestimate the capacity of ordinary citizens to think through issues for themselves, or to intelligently sort through competing sources of information.

Indeed, even Jeff Bezos, in his attempt to be critical of legacy media, could not resist depicting alternative media exclusively in negative terms. “Many people,” he lamented, “are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions.”

While there is undoubtedly an abundance of confusion and false and misleading information on social media, it is by no means absent from the legacy media, which has gotten major issues badly wrong. For example, many mainstream journalists and talk show hosts uncritically celebrated the idea that Covid vaccines would block viral transmission, in the absence of any solid scientific evidence for such a belief. Similarly, many journalists dismissed the Covid lab-leak theory out of hand, until it emerged that it was actually a scientifically respectable hypothesis.

We should thank Jeff Bezos for highlighting the crisis of trust in the media. But his complacency about the integrity of traditional news sources and his dismissive attitude toward “alternative sources” of news and information are themselves part of the reason why many people are losing respect for the legacy media.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society in Pamplona, Spain, and a recipient of the prestigious Ramón y Cajal research grant (2017-2021, extended through 2023), awarded by the Spanish government to support outstanding research activities. Prior to his appointment to the University of Navarra, he held several research and teaching positions in the United States, including visiting assistant professor at Bucknell and Villanova, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program. Dr Thunder earned his BA and MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, and his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame.

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