OTTAWA – Absent during Monday night’s only English-language leaders’ debate, telecom and broadcasting were eventually raised during the scrums with journalists afterward at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.
Andrew Scheer, whose Conservative Party has yet to release its full campaign platform, was asked whether he planned to tackle telecom affordability as the Liberals, NDP and Greens have already announced they would do.
“What Justin Trudeau has proposed is a goal without a plan,” Scheer replied. “He says this is something he’s going to do just by asking companies to do it. If that would have worked, why hadn’t he done that years ago? A goal without a plan is just a dream. I don’t expect anything to come from Justin Trudeau’s platform.”
Last month, the Liberals unveiled their plan to lower cellphone bills by 25% within four years.
Trudeau was not asked about this or his party’s proposal to tax and regulate multinational digital giants, such as Facebook and Google.
But Scheer was pushed to reveal whether the Tories have “a goal or a plan” regarding telecom.
“We believe that robust competition is the best way to make sure that Canadians have affordable services,” he said.
Green Leader Elizabeth May was also asked to clarify whether her party’s plans to tax tech giants was an e-commerce tax, a sales tax, or something similar to what the Liberals have proposed through a 3% tax on revenue generated through the sale of online advertising and user data by digital companies with global revenues of at least $1 billion a year, and Canadian revenues of at least $40 million a year.
“It’s not a sales tax,” she said. “We’re looking at a structure that ensures e-commerce companies – whether it’s Airbnb or Google or Facebook or Amazon or Netflix – are paying tax into the Government of Canada system, but not at the sales-tax level.”
In the costing portion of the Green platform, the party in fact proposes to collect sales taxes from e-commerce companies, and prohibit Canadian businesses from deducting the cost of advertising on foreign-owned sites such as Google and Facebook, which it projects will result in $258 million in revenue during the 2020-21 fiscal year.
According to the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer the measure will require e-commerce companies collect and submit GST/HST on all their transactions in Canada.
“We need to close the loophole, which right now makes it more advantageous for businesses to put their ads with Facebook and Google instead of with publishers within Canada, so at that level it becomes a sales tax,” May told reporters. “At other levels, we’d be applying it further upstream to make sure that we collect almost like a levy on their ability to do business within Canada.”
The Green Party proposes a corporate tax on foreign-owned e-commerce companies doing business in Canada, which would result in $780 million in revenue for 2020-21.
“We want to make sure that we apply taxes on these e-commerce companies in a way that recoups for Canada a fair share of what they should be paying in taxes,” said May, who also made a connection to the housing crisis in her home province of British Columbia.
“Twenty percent of our housing stock stands empty because they’ve been converted into Airbnbs,” said the Green Member of Parliament for the federal B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands. “It’s a complex area of business activity that we never anticipated, even 10 years ago.”
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh also weighed in on this area, but raised it when asked why he would not intervene in court challenges of Quebec’s controversial Bill 21 secularism law.
He said that he wants to show Quebecers that he is aligned with their values and interests: that he is pro-choice; supports LGBTQ rights; wants to tackle climate change and push for a more “just society;” and is against tax havens and in favour of “taxing web giants.”
“We can work together, even though I wear a turban,” added Singh, a Sikh and the first non-white leader of a major federal political party.
Friends of Canadian Broadcasting executive director Daniel Bernhard told Cartt.ca that he was surprised hitting up digital giants for revenue wasn’t addressed when affordability and economic insecurity were raised during the debate.
Another “missed opportunity,” he believes, was when the topic shifted to the polarization involving human rights and immigration, “and no one talked about trolls and hyper-partisans just revving people up and getting them mad,” particularly during the election campaign.
Although that wasn’t discussed on the debate stage, it made an awkward appearance during the leaders’ Q-and-As with journalists.
Earlier on Monday, a Federal Court judge gave right wing media organizations Rebel Media and the True North Centre for Public Policy the green light to cover the leaders’ debate after the Leaders’ Debates Commission denied them access on the basis that they engage in advocacy.
But Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet cared little about the court victory.
When Rebel News reporter Keean Bexte tried to ask him a question, Blanchet shut him down. “I won’t answer Rebel News,” said the Bloc leader.
“Okay, I’ll keep asking the question because a judge said we can be here and ask questions,” Bexte persisted.
“Western separatism is on the rise, and if TMX [the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project] is cancelled by a May-Singh-Trudeau coalition, that tension will inevitably spike even more. What’s your advice to Albertans who think that Confederation is broken?”
Blachet replied: “My answer is that I won’t answer you.”
The final leaders’ debate will happen Thursday in French.
