Sir Osis of Liver 🇨🇦 🇲🇽 on Nostr: He's doing pretty much exactly what I'd hoped for. The Digital Services Tax was just ...

He's doing pretty much exactly what I'd hoped for.

The Digital Services Tax was just another form of tariff. Google, AWS etc, had already been collecting a surcharge to cover the costs of the tax that Canadian advertisers had to pay. Despite rosy projections, it was only ever going to bring in less than a billion in gross revenue. Lord knows what the admin costs would have been.

So it ended up being an easy concession to make and took some of the heat off, at least temporarily.

As satisfying as it would be to kick Trump in the nuts and piss on his carpet, all it would do is provoke a shit tonne of retaliatory measures and increase instability. The people who take that on the chin are always going to be workers.

With 75% of our exports going to the US we are not in the same position as the EU, or the UK, or China. Until we can diversify our client markets, we have to be cautious.

Taxing commodities like copper, steel and aluminum, just makes US finished goods more expensive. That's a trade advantage for us. Retaliatory measures that we take had best be targeted not to do the same thing for our industries.

Carney isn't negotiating in public and he's keeping things moving even if at a glacial pace. The longer he can drag things out, the closer he gets to the mid-terms and the more pressure lands on Trump to sign something he can show as a win. It was a strategy that helped to limit damage the last time. Makes sense to pull the same play now.

I think a fair number of people thought of the Liberals as NDP-Lite, which has never been the case. They drift left or right depending on the mood of the country.