US President Donald Trump said that he played trade talks with Canada because of his plans to continue his tax on technology companies, which he described as “direct and obvious attack on our country”.
Mr. Trump said in a contribution in his social media network, Canada had just informed the USA that it was followed by his plan to charge the tax of digital services that apply to Canadian and foreign companies that are committed to online users in Canada. The tax should come into force on Monday.
“Based on this outrageous tax, we hereby end all discussions about the trade with Canada. We will inform Canada about the tariff that you will pay for the shops with the United States within the next seven days,” said Trump in his social post.
The announcement by Mr. Trump was the recent step in the trade war, which he started for a second term in January since taking office.
The progress with Canada was a roller coaster ride, starting with the US President, who repeatedly indicates that he would be absorbed as a US state in the USA.
The Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Friday that his country “would continue to carry out these complex negotiations in the best interest of the Canadians. It is a negotiation”.
Mr. Trump later said that he would expect Canada to remove the tax.
“Economically, we have such power over Canada. We would rather not use it,” said Trump in the Oval Office.
“It won’t work for Canada. They were stupid to do it.”
When asked whether Canada could do something to restart talks, he suggested that Canada could remove the tax, and predicted that this said: “I don’t care.”
Mr. Carney visited Mr. Trump in the White House in May. Mr. Trump traveled to Canada for the G7 summit in Alberta last week, where Mr. Carney said that Canada and the United States had set a 30-day period for trade talks.
The Digital Services Tax will make companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber and Airbnb with a delivery of 3% of Canadian users. It is applied retrospectively and US companies with a legislation of two billion US dollars (£ 1.4 billion), which is due at the end of the month, remain.
“We appreciate the administration’s decisive response to the discriminatory tax of Canada on US -Digital exports,” said Matt Schruers, Managing Director of Computer & Communications Industry Association.
Canada and the USA discussed the loosening of a number of steep tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on goods from the neighbor of America.
The Republican President previously reported reporters that the United States would soon have prepared to send letters to different countries and to inform them about the new tariff rate that its administration would impose them.