OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Tuesday she was cautiously optimistic about resolving a dispute with the United States over Ottawa’s planned Digital Services Tax (DST) on big technology companies.
The digital services plan aims to address the challenge of taxing digital giants like Alphabet and Amazon.com, which can book their profits in low-tax countries.
The US government has repeatedly objected to the proposed Canadian tax. Washington claims it is unfairly singling out U.S. companies and has called on Ottawa to abandon the plan.
“I was in Washington last week and we had some good conversations about daylight saving time, including at the official level. “I remain cautiously optimistic that we can reach an agreement with our American partners,” Freeland told reporters in Ottawa.
Canada announced earlier this year that it was moving forward with its tax plan after two years of dithering to allow for a global consensus on taxation of multinational companies.
The process of negotiating a global tax agreement has been drawn out and was further postponed in July to allow for further negotiations. Countries other than Canada that have a summer time tax have agreed to wait at least another year for the global agreement rather than implement their taxes.
Ottawa says not implementing daylight saving time for another year would put Canada at a disadvantage compared to countries that have collected revenue from their existing digital services taxes.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Editing by Chris Reese and Jonathan Oatis)
“Amateur web enthusiast. Award-winning creator. Extreme music expert. Wannabe analyst. Organizer. Hipster-friendly tv scholar. Twitter guru.”