President Donald Trump said on Friday that he has ended trade talks with Canada and will soon announce a new tariff rate for that country, as stated in a Truth Social post.
The decision to end the months-long negotiations came after Canada announced a digital service tax (DST) that Trump called “a direct and blatant attack on our Country.”
“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,” he wrote.
"We'll continue to conduct these complex negotiations in the best interest of Canadians," Prime Minister Mark Carney said. He did not respond to questions about whether his government is prepared to drop the DST — an action the Business Council of Canada is calling for in exchange for U.S. tariff relief.
Beginning on June 30, the DST would require U.S. companies, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber, and Airbnb, to pay a 3% levy on revenue from Canadian users. The policy will apply retroactively, leaving U.S. companies with a $ 2 billion bill.
The DST tug-of-war between Canada and the U.S. has been ongoing for years, with former President Joe Biden's ambassador to Canada, David L. Cohen, warning during his tenure that if a DST were enacted, the U.S. would retaliate.
While Canada and other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries had been discussing some global DST, the Justin Trudeau administration decided to move ahead with its own tax rather than wait for coordinated action.
What is the digital services tax (DST)?
Here are just the facts:
A digital services tax (DST) is a tax levied on the gross revenues generated from certain digital activities within a jurisdiction. It is not an income tax, online sales tax, or VAT.
Key characteristics of DSTs:
- Tax base: Revenues from specific digital services. Examples include online advertising, digital intermediary services (like online marketplaces), and the sale of user data.
- Target: Primarily aimed at large, multinational companies providing digital services to users in a specific country.
- Purpose: To address the challenge of taxing digital businesses that operate globally and may not have a physical presence in the countries where they generate revenue. Many countries believe that multinational tech companies should contribute a fair share of tax revenue in the jurisdictions where they have users and derive value.
- Structure: DSTs typically involve:
- Defining the scope of digital services subject to the tax.
- Calculating a company's presence in the jurisdiction based on user location or other factors.
- Applying a tax rate to the estimated revenue generated within that jurisdiction.
- Examples of taxable activities: Online sales, digital advertising, data usage, e-commerce, streaming and downloading, and Software as a Service (SaaS). Australia's DST, for instance, includes online dating services, website design, and webinars.
- Potential impacts: DSTs can potentially lead to higher prices for consumers as businesses may pass on the costs. They can also affect loyalty programs and may increase government overhead and export risks.
Why countries implement DSTs:
- To ensure fair taxation of multinational companies operating in their jurisdiction, even without a physical presence.
- To capture tax revenue from the growing digital economy.
- To level the playing field between international and domestic digital service providers.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum. He is also the publisher of the Latino News Network.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.