So this is a long but very interesting read if you want to understand WHY Canada enacted the 'digital' tax and WHY Trump turned around and simply cut off all trade talks.
I found it fascinating insight into both and didn't understand the backstory. Written by a European economist, so the perspective not some MAGA right winger parroting talking points but someone from the other side, looking rationally at what is happening. Interesting stuff.
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Hat tip to ZeroHedge for publishing the story from Thomas Kolbe.
How Canada's Digital Tax Exposes Brussels' Globalist Playbook: A Trump Retaliation
By Thomas Kolbe
Now the cards are on the table. Amid the heated phase of trade talks with the U.S., Canada is introducing a digital tax that will burden American tech giants with billions in costs. In response, President Trump broke off talks with Ottawa and announced new tariffs.
Among poker players, you know the coldly calculating player: He calculates probabilities, weighs risks, and plays his hand with sober precision. Sitting beside him is the gambler – impulsive but not reckless. He acts spectacularly, yet within a strategic framework he masters with virtuosity. Now imagine a pathological exception alongside these archetypes: a player who reveals his cards before the round even begins, only to go all-in immediately after. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney falls into this category.
Brussels’ Governor in North America
The former Governor of the Bank of England, a committed globalist and climate crusader, and following the spectacular failure of Justin Trudeau, the new enforcer of the European agenda in North America, has gotten himself entangled in a geopolitical game of va banque with the announcement of a digital penalty tax on foreign tech companies.
The tax is set to take effect on July 1, retroactive to January 1, 2022, and will squeeze foreign tech firms with over 20 million Canadian dollars in revenue at a rate of three percent. Ottawa is calling for payment — aiming its arrow at the heart of America’s economic powerhouse, Silicon Valley. U.S. giants like Apple, Meta, and X face penalty payments exceeding two billion U.S. dollars.
An affront at the worst possible time (or was the escalation planned?), staged by a prime minister playing a weak hand from a position of weakness. Much like in Germany, productivity and per capita income have declined since the devastating lockdowns — the EU-inspired agenda of climate regulation, migration chaos, and a socialist redistribution state is cutting a swath of economic paralysis through society.
Carney proves to be the ideal candidate for that globalist elite steering resource-rich Canada into the next phase of its decline. In negotiations with Donald Trump, he acts entirely in the style of Brussels’ negotiating school: making maximal demands, refusing any form of compromise, and publicly prioritizing ideological principles over a rational negotiation path.
Missing the Turning Point
But this time, the script seems to call for a turning point: the response from Washington was swift — and decidedly blunt. Trump called Canada’s political leadership a “copy of the EU” in reaction to Carney’s digital tax, warning that new U.S. tariffs will soon follow.
Indeed, Ottawa is faithfully following Brussels’ line: censorship laws, regulation of media platforms, fiscal grabs on U.S. companies — all aimed at breaking American dominance in the digital sphere and, as a side benefit, easing the overstretched state budget a bit. What drives a prime minister at this stage of trade talks to escalate to the maximum level becomes clear if one follows Trump’s hinted line and understands Canada as a resource-rich EU satellite. Carney is intimately familiar only with the scorched earth strategy.
Thus, Trump’s uncompromising response sends an unmistakable signal to Brussels: the era of fair-weather diplomacy is over. You will have to move.
Trump Exposes Brussels’ Lying Machine
As Europeans who claim free self-determination and individual sovereignty, we should be thankful to Donald Trump. As at the start of the trade dispute with the EU, he shines a glaring spotlight on Ottawa’s protectionism in Canada’s case. The public needs more evidence of Brussels’ often cleverly disguised protectionism and its Canadian branch office. Trump explicitly mentioned in his reply to Carney the tariff barrier of up to 400 percent Canada long imposed against American agriculture well before the tariff dispute.
Lies, moralizing manipulation of apodictic opinion, and cold-blooded protectionism — that most clearly describes the Brussels line.
In public discourse, EU Europe always portrays itself as the defender of free trade, as a liberal and open order power. Behind the scenes, however, they overwhelm non-European competitors with a web of harmonization duties, climate regulations, and rulebooks that kill fair competition in the cradle. A free trade with built-in entry barriers and a minefield to deter newcomers — technically well-packaged, morally justified, economically devastating.
Trump’s hard line on Brussels and Canada also makes him an enlightener of geopolitical reality. It is to be expected that in the trade dispute with Brussels, we will encounter more, hitherto undisclosed, instruments from the European protectionism toolbox. As said: the cards are now on the table.
Warning Signal to the “Five Eyes”
The clumsy escalation attempt by the Canadian prime minister has exposed a geopolitical fault line: on one side, the United States and its partners, committed to values of freedom. Think here of Argentina’s President Javier Milei. On the other side, a globalist cartel is forming, led by EU Brussels and its satellites like Ottawa. Thanks to the internal political turn of the Trump administration, this difference is now glaringly clear. While in Europe, politics, unions, churches, and the “cordon sanitaire” of the green-socialist agenda — consisting of a host of NGOs and state media — blindly defend the woke climate and redistribution agenda, the wind has already shifted in the U.S.
The violent clashes in heavily European-influenced strongholds of California underscore the growing pressure from the new U.S. administration on these milieus. The same goes for migration policy. Here, the chasm between the U.S. and the EU is so wide that even the trained eye, looking through the rose-colored glasses of European propaganda, can no longer hide reality: the U.S. is handling its migration crisis and returning to internal political seriousness.
Trump sends a clear signal to the Western world: whoever tries to siphon off America’s innovative strength or block it through regulation will be declared a pariah without hesitation. Delivered via Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, this message from yesterday is addressed to the EU, to Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom — and to the tech industry in Silicon Valley itself, which can now be assured of White House backing.
“We will let Canada know what tariff they must pay to do business with the United States of America,” Trump said. The U.S. president is not just imposing an economic sanction — he is putting the true power relations, visible to all, in the spotlight. Anyone who wants to do business on the world’s largest single market will have to accept the host’s rules. This is the new sound people will have to get used to — fast.
America’s New Role
Just as in monetary policy, where the U.S. succeeded in abandoning London’s City and the LIBOR mechanism controlled by European banks by introducing the SOFRsystem, a new American course is emerging geopolitically. Trump’s May trip through the Middle East also set a new tone: business took center stage, early attempts at a new mercantile order in the region are emerging. Whether Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or the United Arab Emirates — Trump convinced them all to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the reindustrialization of the United States.
No European moralizing, no divisive politics to consolidate power locally — Trump is daring to reorder the Middle East.
Hectic Weeks Ahead
And Europe? Much like in the case of the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program by the U.S. military or the rare earth deal involving Ukraine, European politics no longer even plays a supporting role. It has become irrelevant. There are retreat battles and distractions, like Canada’s digital tax, which reveal the geopolitical weakness of the Old Continent. Europe is stuck on the defensive — dependent on third-party energy flows, entangled in the Ukraine conflict, and powerless in managing global trade.
Transferring this geopolitical loss of relevance of Europeans to the upcoming trade talks with the U.S., we can expect spectacular Brussels flips, media squabbles, and the usual vilification of the U.S. president in frenzied media. The Euro cartel and its allies have yet to intellectually or politically make the leap forward.
Just as Brussels mistakenly assumes that it has gotten off lightly with Trump accepting the NATO 2% goal as sufficient for now, hoping to slip back into familiar behavioral patterns and delay tactics, a bitter truth threatens in the trade dispute: the U.S. is serious, and it will solve its domestic problems by returning to American values of free-market economy, minimal state, and personal responsibility. And these values will be defended abroad with maximum severity.
* * *
Thomas Kolbe is a German graduate economist. For over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.
truthsocial.com
Trump will bring the liberals in Ottawa to their knees if
