🇨🇦🇺🇸 Canada pulls Trump back

In a breaking piece of news late Sunday night, it was announced that Canada’s government has decided to rescind the digital services tax to continue trade negotiations with the United States in hopes of getting a deal done by July 21st.

Just before the weekend, President Trump announced that the United States was walking away from trade talks with Canada over Canada’s plan to roll out the digital services tax that largely affects America’s big tech companies (remember all those CEO’s standing behind Trump during his inauguration?).

Not only did President Trump say he was walking away from negotiations, but he also claimed he would impose additional tariffs within a week in retaliation for the tax. With Canada rescinding the tax, no additional tariffs will come into play as they continue to negotiate.

🤔 Why did this tax cause such a big issue and what is it?

The bill was passed last year and is modelled on similar levies that European countries apply to big tech companies.

The tax is a 3% levy on digital revenues that come from ads, marketplace, social media and data services tied to Canadian users and it’s retroactive to January 1, 2022. Before being rescinded, the bill was set to take effect today. That means companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber and Airbnb would have a bill that was collectively worth $2-billion USD due at the end of the month.

The tax was expected to raise $7.2-billion CDN by 2027.

👎 No one down south was a fan.

This bill was a problem for years as former president Joe Biden’s Canadian ambassador had said the U.S. would hit back if Canada enacted the digital services tax.

😬 More demands on hold

On Sunday, President Trump got angry as he made a list of new demands to re-open trade talks with Canada. He listed past issues about Canada’s supply management policies that control the production and imports of dairy products and eggs. However, with the digital services tax being pulled back, President Trump has walked back the “new” demands and has been brought back to the negotiating table.

Bottom line: No one in the States was a fan of this bill, including someone former Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau worked well with, former President Joe Biden. It’s a big tax on multi-billion dollar corporations that make money off user data. Already not a fan of it from the European Union, President Trump took great exception to Canada threatening to enact the tax during trade negotiations.

🇨🇦 Canadian Headlines

📚Ontario takes over 4 school boards. Doug Ford’s government announced that it would be stepping in to oversee four school boards in Ontario: Toronto public and Catholic school boards, Ottawa-Carleton and Dufferin-Peel Catholic due to what the government considers “mismanagements” that were discovered during “recent financial investigations.” The province claims these boards are “running unsustainable deficits despite receiving similar, stable funding as other boards across the province.” The education minister has come out hard with his mandate in the last three months, taking control of five school boards and that number is likely to rise. Critics argue that education in the province needs more funding and less control.

📉Economy stumbles. The trade war showed its effects in April as the manufacturing sector registered its largest drop since the COVID-19 pandemic. Canada’s GDP slid by 0.1%, which fell short of Statistics Canada’s estimate for a small increase in growth. Manufacturing dropped by 1.9% in April.

🏥Diagnostics get a boost. Doug Ford’s government announced an investment of $155-million over two years into 57 publicly funded, privately operated diagnostic centres for MRI and CT scans and gastrointestinal endoscopy services. The new clinics are expected to ease the burden on hospitals. Of the 57, 35 will be for MRI and CT scan centres and 22 for endoscopy services.

🇨🇦Canada orders shutdown of foreign entity. Industry Minister, Melanie Joly, said the federal government ordered Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer, Hikvision, to cease operations in Canada over national security concerns. The company has faced sanctions in the United States over the past five and a half years.

🏫Crisis mode in teaching. Nearly every province in Canada has been faced with teacher shortages. Some boards have resorted to using unqualified substitutes, uncertified adults to supervise classrooms and different substitutes stepping in day-to-day who aren’t qualified to teach the subject - because learning French from someone who can only say “bonjour” is a recipe for success. While an aging population is blamed by some, poor working conditions, such as higher workloads, less support and more violence and aggression are cited as the main issues.

🏦 Numbers

🇨🇦55 Canadians. Foreign affairs minister, Anita Anand, says approximately 55 Canadians have been detained by U.S. ICE. Last week, a Canadian held by ICE was found dead at the age of 49.

🍿$144-million. It was a race of one to a huge box office this weekend. F1: The Movie, hailed as this year’s summer blockbuster, opened globally with $144-million at the box office. This became Apple’s biggest hit on the big screen; despite their strong lineup, their films have driven people to Apple TV+ rather than the theatres.

🤖Poaching 4 more. Meta poached 4 more researchers from OpenAI as they continue to try and claw their way from behind in the AI wars after April’s disappointing Llama 4 AI launch.

🚨 More Headlines

🇵🇸Israel strike kills 72. Despite prospects of a ceasefire reportedly improving, an Israeli strike killed 72 people across Gaza over the weekend. President Trump claims he’s working on getting an agreement to a ceasefire between the two within the next week. Over 6,000 have been killed since the last ceasefire ended.

🇺🇦Biggest airstrike yet. Three years into the war, Russia hit Ukraine with its largest aerial attack since the war started. Russia launched 537 aerial weapons, including 477 drones and decoys and 60 missiles. 249 were shot down and 226 were lost.

💭 ICYMI

🔥Anthropic destroys books to train AI. Court documents revealed the company spent millions to physically scan print books to train its AI, Claude. To do this, the company cut the books from its bindings, scanned them into digital files and then threw away the originals. The judge considered this fair use. What the judge didn’t consider fair use was the fact that Anthropic used everyone’s favourite website to get textbooks during university, LibGen, to pirate 7 million eBooks to train its AI. The judge ordered a separate trial on this to determine the damages for piracy. A major precedent was set: it’s okay for companies to use physical books they bought to train AI, but pirating the books is a big no-no.

🔵Will the Democrats get the message this time? Self-proclaimed democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, won NYC’s mayoral primary over establishment Democrat, former governor, Andrew Cuomo, with 43.5% of the vote, 7.1% more than Cuomo in second place. Is this a message to the Democrats that their supporters want change? If it is, will they sweep it under the rug the same way they did Bernie in 2016 because policies that help regular people day-to-day are too extreme?

🇮🇹”No” to Bezos. Venetians protested the wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez which had 200 celebrity guests in attendance. The protest centred around the exploitation of the city by the fourth-richest man in the world as ordinary citizens suffer from over-tourism, high housing costs and climate catastrophes such as flooding. Jeff Bezos donated 1-million euros each to three organizations working to preserve Venice, but protestors called out the move as “greenwashing.”

🩳Lululemon sues Costco. That’s right, everyone’s favourite $1 hotdog is going to court, but this time for its clothing offerings. Lululemon filed a lawsuit claiming Costco’s Kirkland-brand sweatshirts, jackets and pants are knockoffs of Lululemon’s line of products and are indistinguishable enough that it could fool consumers into thinking they’re getting the real thing.

😊 Not everything needs to be serious…

Not everything needs to be serious and dreary. We can smile at the news too, and one of my goals is to end every edition with a story that you wouldn’t ordinarily see in the news, but that will hopefully make you smile.

I remember back in the day going to MarineLand once and thinking it was really cool to see all the animals you could really only see in the ocean up close. I was eight-years-old and didn’t know any better. Thankfully, more places are starting to wise up. MarineLand is closed (thankfully) and now Mexico’s Senate voted unanimously (99-0) to approve a nationwide ban on dolphin and all other marine mammal shows.

Read more about the story and what brought the ban on here. 🐬