US to restart trade negotiations with Canada immediately, White House says
The United States will restart trade negotiations with Canada immediately after Canada scrapped its digital services tax targeting U.S. technology firms, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Monday.
“Absolutely,” Hassett said on Fox News when asked about the talks restarting. President Donald Trump asked the Canadians to take the tax off at the G7 meeting in Canada, he said. “It’s something that they’ve studied, now they’ve agreed to, and for sure, that means that we can get back to the negotiations.”
Canada scrapped its digital services tax targeting U.S. technology firms late on Sunday, just hours before it was due to take effect, in a bid to advance stalled trade negotiations with the United States.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump will resume trade negotiations in order to agree on a deal by July 21, Canada’s finance ministry said in a statement.
Trump abruptly called off trade talks on Friday over the tax targeting U.S. technology firms, saying that it was a “blatant attack.”
He reiterated his comments on Sunday, pledging to set a new tariff rate on Canadian goods within the next week, which threatened to push U.S.-Canada relations back into chaos after a period of relative calm.
The breakdown in trade talks comes after the two leaders met at the G7 in mid-June, and Carney said they had agreed to wrap up a new economic agreement within 30 days.
Canada’s planned digital tax was 3% of the digital services revenue a firm takes in from Canadian users above $20 million in a calendar year, and payments were to be retroactive to 2022.
It would have impacted U.S. technology firms, including Amazon AMZN.O, Meta META.O, Alphabet’s Google GOOGL.O and Apple AAPL.O, among others.
