By: Bill Phillips
I never have been a fan of the federal government’s digital services tax.
It’s the tax aimed at making major social media platforms pay for sharing Canadian news content on their sites. Being in the media world, one might think I’d be gung-ho about such a tax. The reason I don’t like the tax is that it was never designed to solve a problem.
It was designed to funnel money to large media corporations which have failed, or refused, to adapt to the digital age. It was a bail-out, pure and simple. Smaller, independent media outlets were never eligible for the funding. Nor were online media outlets where most of the really good journalism is happening these days.
Maybe it’s just sour grapes because I didn’t reap any benefit. Could be. But, like I said, the tax was never about fixing a problem.
Google eventually ponied up some cash but Facebook simply blocked the sharing of Canadian news stories on its platform. Yup, these are the same guys who like to scream “freedom of speech” every time someone gets in the way of them making more money than anyone could possibly ever need.
So that was then. This is now. Things change. The big change for us here in Canada, who have learned to live without Canadian news on our Facebook pages, is we are now under direct attack from the United States. U.S. president Donald Trump has declared war on Canada.
It’s unlikely (but not impossible) that Trump will use the might of the U.S. army to turn our cities into rubble. But make no mistake, like all oppressors, he is more than willing to turn the country into rubble before swooping in and pulling the gold teeth out of the economic corpse that remains.
We are to Trump as Ukraine is to Putin … submit or be destroyed.
We have to fight back … hard.
Imposing our own tariffs are one thing, but we can, and must, do more. That’s why I’m not all that opposed to the digital services tax now.
Taxing American companies doing business in this country isn’t a bad thing now and let’s get tough about it. If Facebook doesn’t want to pay the tax and shuts down our news outlets, why don’t we ban Facebook from operating in this country completely?
And then there’s Elon Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
The U.S. was set to ban Tik Tok, and still might. Why? Because Tik Tok is Chinese-owned and the fear is the private information we give to Tik Tok may end up in the hands of the Chinese government. It’s a legitimate concern.
Well, X is owned by Musk, who is now an agent of the U.S. government. We should be very, very concerned that our private data collected on X is going straight into the hands of the U.S. government. The same government that is hoping to assimilate us.
That’s enough for me to say Canada should ban X in this country completely.
In addition, we just went through an inquiry about foreign interference. In our elections. We don’t need an inquiry to see that Musk, once again … an agent of the U.S. government, is trying to interfere in not only our elections, but those of democracies around the world.
It’s time Canada started playing hardball and banned X from operating in this country.
Bill Phillips is an award-winning columnist with 35 years of experience in community journalism.
