Trump says he's terminating trade talks with Canada over tax on tech firms
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump said Friday that he's suspending trade talks with Canada over its plans to continue with its tax on technology firms, which he called "a direct and blatant attack on our country."
Trump, in a post on his social media network, said Canada had just informed the U.S. that it was sticking to its plan to impose the digital services tax, which applies to Canadian and foreign businesses that engage with online users in Canada. The tax is set to go into effect Monday.
"Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade 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 his post.
Trump's announcement was the latest swerve in the trade war he's launched since taking office for a second term in January. Progress with Canada has been a roller coaster, starting with the U.S. president poking at the nation's northern neighbor and repeatedly suggesting it would be absorbed as a U.S. state.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Friday that his country would "continue to conduct these complex negotiations in the best interests of Canadians. It's a negotiation."
Trump later said he expects that Canada will remove the tax.
"Economically we have such power over Canada. We'd rather not use it," Trump said in the Oval Office. "It's not going to work out well for Canada. They were foolish to do it."
When asked if Canada could do anything to restart talks, he suggested Canada could remove the tax, predicted it will but said, "It doesn't matter to me."
Carney visited Trump in May at the White House, where he was polite but firm. Trump last week traveled to Canada for the G7 summit in Alberta, where Carney said that Canada and the U.S. had set a 30-day deadline for trade talks.
The digital services tax will hit companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber and Airbnb with a 3% levy on revenue from Canadian users. It will apply retroactively, leaving U.S. companies with a $2 billion U.S. bill due at the end of the month.
"We appreciate the Administration's decisive response to Canada's discriminatory tax on U.S. digital exports," Matt Schruers, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said in a statement.
Canada and the U.S. have been discussing easing a series of steep tariffs Trump imposed on goods from America's neighbor.
The Republican president earlier told reporters that the U.S. was soon preparing to send letters to different countries, informing them of the new tariff rate his administration would impose on them.
Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum as well as 25% tariffs on autos. He is also charging a 10% tax on imports from most countries, though he could raise rates on July 9, after the 90-day negotiating period he set would expire.
Canada and Mexico face separate tariffs of as much as 25% that Trump put into place under the auspices of stopping fentanyl smuggling, though some products are still protected under the 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement signed during Trump's first term.
Addressing reporters after a private meeting with Republican senators Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declined to comment on news that Trump had ended trade talks with Canada.
"I was in the meeting," Bessent said before moving on to the next question.
About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports are from Canada, and 85% of U.S. electricity imports as well.
Canada is also the largest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum and uranium to the U.S. and has 34 critical minerals and metals that the Pentagon is eager to obtain.
About 80% of Canada's exports go to the U.S.
Daniel Beland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal, said it is a domestic tax issue, but it has been a source of tensions between Canada and the United States for a while because it targets U.S. tech giants.
"The Digital Services Tax Act was signed into law a year ago so the advent of this new tax has been known for a long time," Beland said. "Yet, President Trump waited just before its implementation to create drama over it in the context of ongoing and highly uncertain trade negotiations between the two countries."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NHK
12 minutes ago
- NHK
Israeli ambassador to attend Nagasaki peace ceremony on August 9
Israel's ambassador to Japan has expressed his intention to attend this year's peace ceremony marking the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The city did not invite Israel for the annual August 9 event last year. Gilad Cohen made the remarks during a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on Friday. Describing the ceremony as important, Cohen said, "This shows the respect of the Israeli people to the Japanese people in this very difficult moment of remembrance and mutual understanding of the importance of peace." Last year, Nagasaki City decided not to extend an invitation to the Israeli ambassador, as it sought to hold the ceremony smoothly in a calm and solemn atmosphere. Ambassadors from the Group of Seven nations, excluding Japan, also skipped last year's event. For this year's ceremony, Nagasaki has invited all countries and regions with representatives in Japan. The Russian Embassy in Japan said on Friday that Ambassador Nikolay Nozdrev will attend. Russia and Belarus had been excluded until 2024. British Ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom also expressed her intention to attend when she visited Nagasaki earlier this month. The ambassador was absent last year.
Japan Times
4 hours ago
- Japan Times
Trump's court win opens a path to clear hurdles to his agenda
The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling curbing the power of judges to block government actions on a nationwide basis has raised questions about whether dozens of orders that have halted President Donald Trump's policies will stand. The conservative majority's ruling Friday came in a fight over Trump's plan to limit automatic birthright citizenship. But it may have far-reaching consequences for the ability of U.S. courts to issue orders that apply to anyone affected by a policy, not just the parties who filed lawsuits. Judges entered nationwide preliminary orders halting Trump administration actions in at least four dozen of the 400 lawsuits filed since he took office in January, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. Some were later put on hold on appeal. Nationwide orders currently in place include blocks on the administration's revocation of foreign students' legal status, freezes of domestic spending and foreign aid, funding cuts related to gender-affirming care and legal services for migrant children, and proof-of-citizenship rules for voting. The Supreme Court's new precedent doesn't instantly invalidate injunctions in those cases. But the Justice Department could quickly ask federal judges to revisit the scope of these and other earlier orders in light of the opinion. 'Fair game' "Everything is fair game,' said Dan Huff, a lawyer who served in the White House counsel's office during Trump's first term. A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment. Trump said at a news conference in the White House Friday that the administration will "promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.' Trump listed cases that they would target, including suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding and "stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender surgeries.' The Trump administration has made it a priority to contest court orders that block policies on a nationwide, or universal, basis, although the controversy over whether those types of rulings are an appropriate use of judicial power has been brewing for years. Conservative advocates won such orders when Democratic presidents were in office as well. Noting the mounting pushback and debate, judges in dozens of other cases involving Trump's policies have limited their orders against the administration to the parties that sued or within certain geographical boundaries. Anastasia Boden, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation whose practice includes suing the federal government, said she didn't see the ruling as a total "retreat' from judges' authority to enter universal orders going forward. Multiple paths "It's addressing the case where a plaintiff is getting relief that applies to everyone across the country merely because judges think that it's an important issue,' she said. "But it doesn't change the case where the plaintiff needs that relief.' Boden offered the example of a challenge to government spending, in which the only way to halt an unlawful action would be to stop payment of federal dollars across the country, not just to individual plaintiffs or in certain areas. Trump's opponents say the justices' decision still leaves them with multiple paths to sue the administration over actions they contend are unlawful and even to argue for nationwide relief. Those options include class action lawsuits, cases seeking to set aside agency actions under a U.S. law known as the Administrative Procedure Act and even continuing to argue that nationwide relief is the only way to stop harm to individual plaintiffs, like parties did in the birthright citizenship cases. But they also acknowledged the court significantly raised the burden of what they have to prove to win those types of orders. "This is going to make it more challenging, more complicated, potentially more expensive to seek orders that more broadly stop illegal government action,' Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, said. "It is watering down the power of federal courts to check government misconduct.' The Supreme Court sent the birthright citizenship cases back to lower court judges to reconsider the scope of orders pausing Trump's restrictions while the legal fight on its constitutionality continues. The justices did not rule on the core question of whether the policy itself is lawful. The administration can't fully enforce the birthright policy for at least another 30 days. Democratic state attorneys general involved in the birthright litigation highlighted language in Justice Amy Coney Barrett's majority opinion that the court didn't shut off the possibility that the states could still successfully argue for a nationwide order. Speaking with reporters after the ruling, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin said that he and his Democratic colleagues would "assess' the impact on other cases. He said they already had been judicious in asking judges for nationwide relief as opposed to orders that restricted administration policies in specific states. "The court confirmed what we've thought all along — nationwide relief should be limited, but it is available to states when appropriate,' Platkin said.
5 hours ago
イランに「孤独ではない」 旧ソ連経済同盟が首脳会議
After the Supreme Court issued a ruling that limits the ability of federal judges to issue universal injunctions — but didn't rule on the legality of President Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship — immigrant rights groups are trying a new tactic by filing a national class action lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two immigrant rights organizations whose members include people without legal status in the U.S. who "have had or will have children born in the United States after February 19, 2025," according to court documents. One of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, William Powell, senior counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, says his colleagues at CASA, Inc. and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project think that, with the class action approach "we will be able to get complete relief for everyone who would be covered by the executive order." The strategic shift required three court filings: one to add class allegations to the initial complaint; a second to move for class certification; and a third asking a district court in Maryland to issue "a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction asking for relief for that putative class," Powell said. In the amended complaint, filed two hours after the Supreme Court's ruling, the immigrant rights attorneys said that Trump's effort to ban birthright citizenship, if allowed to stand, "would throw into doubt the citizenship status of thousands of children across the country." "The Executive Order threatens these newborns' identity as United States citizens and interferes with their enjoyment of the full privileges, rights, and benefits that come with U.S. citizenship, including calling into question their ability to remain in their country of birth," reads the complaint. Rights groups and 22 states had asked federal judges to block President Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship. Issued on his first day in office, the executive order states, "the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States." But after three federal district court judges separately blocked Trump's order, issuing universal injunctions preventing its enforcement nationwide, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to block universal injunctions altogether. The Supreme Court did not rule on the birthright issue itself. But after the ruling, Trump called it a "monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law," in a briefing at the White House. The president said the ruling means his administration can now move forward with his efforts to fundamentally reshape longstanding U.S. policy on immigration and citizenship. Friday's ruling quickly sparked questions about how the dispute over birthright citizenship will play out now — and how the ruling on universal injunctions might affect other efforts to push back on executive policies, under President Trump and future presidents. "Nationwide injunctions have been an important tool to prevent blatantly illegal and unconstitutional conduct," the National Immigrant Justice Center's director of litigation, Keren Zwick, said in a statement sent to NPR. The decision to limit such injunctions, she said, "opens a pathway for the president to break the law at will." Both Zwick and Powell emphasized that the Supreme Court did not rule on a key question: whether Trump's executive order is legal. At the White House, Attorney General Pam Bondi would not answer questions about how the order might be implemented and enforced. "This is all pending litigation," she said, adding that she expects the Supreme Court to take up the issue this fall. "We're obviously disappointed with the result on nationwide injunctions," Powell said. But, he added, he believes the Supreme Court will ultimately quash Trump's attack on birthright citizenship. "The executive order flagrantly violates the 14th Amendment citizenship clause and Section 1401a of the Immigration and Nationality Act," Powell said, "both of which guarantee birthright citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States, with only narrow exceptions for ambassadors [and] invading armies." The court's ruling set a 30-day timeframe for the policy laid out in Trump's executive order to take effect. "The Government here is likely to suffer irreparable harm from the District Courts' entry of injunctions that likely exceed the authority conferred by the Judiciary Act," a syllabus, or headnote, of the Supreme Court's ruling states. The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, also discusses the differences between "complete relief " and "universal relief." "Here, prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship," Barrett wrote. "Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete." In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling suggests that constitutional guarantees might not apply to anyone who isn't a party to a lawsuit. The concept of birthright citizenship has deep roots, dating to the English common law notion of jus soli ("right of the soil"). The doctrine was upended for a time in the U.S. by the Supreme Court's notorious Dred Scott ruling. Current legal standing for birthright citizenship in the U.S. extends back to the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was ratified, stating, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." "Any executive order purporting to limit birthright citizenship is just as unconstitutional today as it was yesterday," Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, told NPR. "There is nothing substantively in the decision that undercuts those lower court opinions. The opinion just undercuts the tools available to the courts to enforce that constitutional mandate." Copyright 2025 NPR
