Murray Wood: Canadian boycotting seems to be annoying Trump
Murray Wood says Canadians deciding to boycott travel to the U.S. and avoid buying American products seems to be having ...
OTTAWA — A U.S. senator is calling on Prime Minister Mark Carney to move quickly on repealing the digital services tax.
“You all, to your credit, said you’re not going to collect it. I asked that Canada move as quickly as possible to get a law passed in Parliament making sure that it’s gone permanently,” Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, told media Monday following a meeting between Carney and a bipartisan delegation of four U.S. senators in Ottawa.
“The prime minister was receptive to that,” Wyden added. “He said he would get on it in the fall.”
Carney said in late June he would eliminate the tax — just before a hefty retroactive payment was due that would have cost big U.S. tech companies an estimated US$2 billion.
The move came after U.S. President Donald Trump called a halt to bilateral trade talks over the tax, which would have imposed a three-per-cent levy on tech giants that generate revenue from Canadian users, such as Google, Amazon and Uber.
While the Canada Revenue Agency is not asking for payments to be made through the tax, it has said it will not issue refunds to those who have already paid the tax until Parliament passes a law formally ending it. Google also has said it will wait until that law is passed before refunding customers who paid a surcharge it imposed last year in response to the tax.
The House of Commons is currently on summer break and is set to return on Sept. 15.
The senators — wearing Canada-U.S. friendship bracelets provided by the U.S. Embassy — were in Ottawa to discuss the ongoing trade conflict between the two countries.
Wyden said the senators were there “to talk about making sure that in the days ahead we build on a productive economy for Canada and the United States.”
“And we are bridge builders, not people who throw wrenches,” he added.
Wyden said there was progress in the discussions Monday. “I felt that this was very constructive … and we had concrete ideas where both sides are looking like they want to pursue constructive solutions,” he said.
In addition to Wyden, the delegation included Democratic senators Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
In a joint statement released after Monday’s meetings, Cortez Masto emphasized the “special connection” Americans have with Canada, including the more than one million Canadian tourists who typically visit her state in a given year.
Canadian travel south of the border has declined sharply since Trump took office earlier this year and started threatening to tariff Canada and annex the country to become the “51st state.”
“Despite the chaos of the Trump presidency, I will continue to fight to ensure American workers are treated fairly while strengthening our ties with Canada to bolster our tourism economy and promote American national security. We can do both,” Cortez Masto said.
Wyden said he also brought up softwood lumber, a long-standing trade irritant between Canada and the United States.
“And I think we now have a clear idea of how to proceed, and that’s to build around some sort of quota arrangement,” he said.
Hassan told reporters the senators also spoke to Carney about “the things we can do together to stop the flow of the precursor chemicals that are used to make fentanyl to our countries.”
Carney, who did not stop to talk to reporters after the meeting, remarked that it was a “very good” discussion.
In a news release Monday afternoon, the Prime Minister’s Office said Carney and the senators “underscored the significance of the trading relationship between Canada and the U.S., including the important economic impact of Canadian businesses in the senators’ home states.”
The release said they talked about the steel industry, North American defence and security and “Canada’s successes in dismantling illegal drug smuggling and securing the border,” and that they “expressed a shared commitment” to tackling the fentanyl crisis.
In a letter to Carney on July 10, Trump threatened to impose 35-per-cent tariffs on Canadian goods by Aug. 1, setting a new deadline for trade talks that were supposed to wrap up by now.
On Monday, the senators didn’t answer when asked whether a deal is likely by Aug. 1.
Carney told reporters last week that a trade deal with the U.S. will likely include some tariffs, and that he expects talks to “intensify” ahead of the Aug. 1 deadline.
Asked about the prospect of a tariff-free deal, Murkowski told reporters in Ottawa that is being “left to the hands right now of those that are negotiating.”
“Everything that we know is that these negotiations have been very tightly, very closely held,” she said. “We all want to get to August 1 and beyond with a resolve that works for Canada and works for the United States.”
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told an American television audience on Sunday that Canada will pay tariffs unless it opens its market to the United States.
Members of Trump’s administration have started to signal that there will not be an avalanche of trade deals ahead of the August deadline the president set in letters to national governments around the world.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told media outlet CNBC on Monday that “talks are moving along but the important thing here is the quality of the deal and not the timings of the deals.”
“President Trump has created maximum leverage — as only he can do — and what we are seeing is these imbalances built up over 20, 30, 40 years and we are more concerned with high-quality deals then getting these deals done by Aug. 1,” he said.
— With files from Kelly Geraldine Malone in Washington
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 21, 2025.
Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press
