Those who benefit must pay their fair share.

Big Tech takes loads of money out of Canada but they don't send much back. That's making life much less affordable at a time when no one can afford it.

Search, social media, streaming, ride-share, cloud computing, and now AI: the companies running Canada's digital life pull enormous value out of this country every year. They mine our data, monetize our attention, run their servers on our electricity grid, and sell into a market of 40 million people, and for years they've done it while paying very little. The taxes paid by Big Tech are a fraction of what a Canadian business earning the same revenue would owe.

Fixing that gap isn't optional, it's existential. Our sovereignty and our capacity to fund a good quality of life both depend on a simple principle: those who benefit from this country have to pay their fair share back into it.

It's more than giving back

"We" isn't an abstraction here. It's paying your power bill, buying local instead of on Amazon, having a kid in the Neptune Theatre School or playing hockey at the Forum, showing up to coach a team or run a food drive. Big Tech has a footprint here too. They file for tax credits when they film here, they lease office space in Toronto (or Halifax, until they unionize—ahem, Ubisoft), and they usually pay their bills.

But having an address here isn't the same as being us. A dollar spent at a Canadian business tends to circulate through this economy several times over before it leaves; a dollar spent on a global platform generally leaves the country on the first trip, and gives back only a fraction of what those same kinds of dollars used to return when they went toward locally produced shows and local newsrooms directly. Wherever you land politically, that part isn't really up for debate: they are not us, and the numbers back it up.

What Canada has already tried

The federal government has actually built more of the necessary toolkit than most Canadians realize. The Digital Services Tax would have applied a 3 per cent charge on the advertising, marketplace, and user-data revenue that large tech companies earned from Canadians. That's revenue that Big Tech earned from Canadians but, as the government's own reasoning for the DST put it, "may not otherwise pay tax on."

The Global Minimum Tax Act, passed in 2024, sets a 15 per cent floor on the effective tax rate multinationals pay in every country they operate in, closing off the profit-shifting games that let a company report almost no income in Canada while making billions here.

Also, the CRTC's streaming contribution rule required Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, and Apple to put a share of their Canadian revenue back into Canadian content instead of shipping every dollar south. And this year, Alberta added a version for data centres: a levy on the largest, grid-drawing AI facilities that scales down for companies generating their own power and drops to nothing for the ones that go fully off-grid.

The unfortunate pattern is that Ottawa keeps flinching. The Digital Services Tax lasted about a year before it was rescinded, traded away within days of Trump breaking off trade talks and at a cost of billions in anticipated revenue. The streaming contribution followed almost the same arc: the CRTC raised it from 5 per cent to 15 per cent of Canadian revenue in May 2026, Washington called it a discriminatory trade irritant, and by July the government had announced it would eliminate the requirement entirely and replace it with $600 million a year in public funding instead, Canadian taxpayers picking up the tab the platforms were supposed to cover. Streamers are refusing to even make the old scheduled payments while the change works its way through. In the end, what's left is simple: Canadian taxpayers are footing Netflix's bill.

Holding the line

Not every tool is equally exposed. The Digital Services Tax and the streaming contribution were both Canada acting alone, which made them easy for the Orange Menace to isolate and more difficult for the federal government to defend under pressure. The Global Minimum Tax Act is different: it's Canada's implementation of a rule more than 140 countries agreed to, and no single trading partner can bully Canada out of a floor the rest of the world has also adopted. That's the model worth building on, not the one-off levy that lives or dies on the mood of one negotiation.

Canada is one of the only countries actually standing up to said menace. Recent Nanos polling for CTV News and the Globe and Mail found 85 per cent of Canadians support or somewhat support Prime Minister Mark Carney's rejection of teh most recent with the US, 80 per cent back counter-tariffs even knowing it raises prices, and 69 per cent say they're willing to pay those higher prices themselves—when we can least afford it. That's not a country looking for an excuse to fold. That's unity and resolve. Leaving everyone else behind so the ultra-rich keep getting richer is the American way, not ours, and we shouldn't allow it just because Donald fucking Trump does.

A real pain point for me on the streaming reversal is that it uses public funding, which in my view gets the whole logic backwards. The point was never that Canadian content needed a bigger subsidy. It was that platforms making money from Canadian audiences should be the ones paying for it, not Canadian taxpayers footing the bill so the platforms keep the difference. The same principle applies everywhere else extractive tech touches this economy: if a company draws enough value out of Canada to be worth negotiating over, it's worth taxing properly instead of subsidizing around. In volatile trade negotiations, it's easy to lose the forest for the trees, but pragmatism and principle can be strong bedfellows.

Alberta's data centre levy is a good start, not because the number is large, but because it proves a government can write a rule that scales with how much a company draws from shared infrastructure, the electricity grid in that case, instead of asking for a flat fee or a voluntary pledge. It's only a start, though. Going off-grid doesn't mean a company stops drawing from this country: it still makes money here, still pollutes the air the surrounding community breathes, and under the current levy, it pays nothing at all for either. Scaling the fee to how much a company draws from the grid is the right idea. Scaling it to zero the moment a company gets good at avoiding the grid is not, and the same logic that closes that gap should extend further too, to the data these companies harvest and the attention they monetize, not just the electrons they burn.

None of this requires inventing anything new. Canada has already built a Digital Services Tax, a global minimum tax, a streaming contribution rule, and a provincial data centre levy. What's been missing isn't policy, it's the willingness to keep what gets built. Extractive tech will always draw as much value out of this country as it's allowed to. The only question left is whether "fair share" is a principle worth standing for. If it isn't, this is all just one more step toward a less affordable, lower quality of life.