🇨🇦 Ottawa's Streaming Tax Is Now a Trade War Flashpoint — And Canada Has No Good Answer

U.S. lawmakers are pressing the White House to examine whether Canada's Online Streaming Act constitutes an unfair trade practice and to retaliate if necessary. The act — which forces foreign streamers to fund Canadian content and pay into a regulatory pool — was sold domestically as cultural sovereignty but is now being treated by Washington as a discriminatory trade barrier against American companies.

Here is the uncomfortable truth the Trudeau-era architects of this policy never wanted to face: you cannot simultaneously demand to be treated as a sovereign cultural nation and expect zero consequences when you tax American corporations operating in your market. The streaming act was never really about Canadian culture — it was about bureaucratic control over digital content and shoveling money to the CanCon industrial complex. Now it has handed Washington a legitimate grievance during an already tense trade relationship. The Liberals built a culture war tripwire and called it nation-building.

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