The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - June 03, 2026


Carney Loses Again - Trump forces Liberals to revers 15% Streaming Tax!


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

166.39

Word count

3,568

Sentence count

158

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Wyatt Claypool talks about the Liberal government's decision to reverse their plan to hike the streaming tax from 5% to 15% and why it's going to hurt them in the polls. He also talks about why this is a bad idea and what it means for consumers.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and welcome back to the National Telegraph YouTube channel.
00:00:06.100 I don't know how many more times this exact same scenario is going to play itself out
00:00:11.720 until Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberals learn a lesson,
00:00:15.700 because I feel like I'm living through Groundhog's Day right now.
00:00:19.760 The Liberals, multiple times now, have tried to either implement a new tax
00:00:24.640 or hike an existing tax that mainly only affects American companies,
00:00:29.440 the American government obviously protests the decision, the liberals act defiant in the face
00:00:35.080 of protests, and then they suddenly reverse themselves last minute anyways and pretend
00:00:39.900 it totally wasn't a concession to U.S. President Donald Trump. I'm going to take you guys through
00:00:45.960 what happened here in just a second, but this whole streaming tax thing I actually believe
00:00:50.960 is going to hurt the liberals in the polls because this thing was so obvious. It was so
00:00:56.660 out in the open that I don't even think the elbows-up liberals can avoid just how weak Mark
00:01:02.000 Carney looks in the face of Donald Trump. But before I get into it, I just want to remind you
00:01:07.300 guys, if you like the channel, make sure to leave a like on the video, subscribe if you are not yet
00:01:11.940 a subscriber, and if you want to help the channel be less reliant on the YouTube algorithm, consider
00:01:17.400 hitting the join button below the video and becoming a monthly contributing channel member.
00:01:22.120 But anyways, let's get into this. Again, I feel like I've talked about this story multiple times before, and it is because this story has played out multiple times before, both this year and last year.
00:01:35.640 This is from the Western Standard. This morning, they say, breaking news, Prime Minister Mark Carney is reversing his decision to charge streamers and content producers in Canada a fee that would go towards, quote, producing Canadian content, unquote.
00:01:49.660 So, this is the statement on the government website. It reads,
00:01:54.440 Government of Canada announces immediate support to strengthen Canadian culture and ensure Canadian content remains affordable.
00:02:01.000 Now, you'll notice that's a very weaselly headline on the government website because, in fact, they are actually reversing a support measure for Canadian content by reversing plans to triple the streaming tax from 5% to 15%.
00:02:19.760 Now, I don't support the streaming tax. I think the whole thing is stupid. Subsidizing bad Canadian content doesn't make it better. It just means you get more bad content from places like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, APTN, Global News, and the other taxpayer money-getting legacy media companies. 0.99
00:02:39.940 the thing here though is that the government's basically trying to pretend it's doing both at
00:02:46.740 the same time it's saving you money by canceling the tax which yes they are technically saving
00:02:52.860 people money by not tripling the tax but they're not they're not supporting Canadian content by
00:02:58.840 doing this because previously they said they were supporting Canadian content by tripling it
00:03:03.760 now that they're not doing it somehow they're both supporting Canadian content
00:03:07.220 and saving people money. They're talking out of both sides of their mouths. And this is extremely
00:03:13.260 funny when you realize that they had just voted in favor of implementing this tax hike a few days
00:03:19.900 ago. Here we have Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lansman in the House of Commons just a
00:03:26.460 few days ago arguing in favor of the Conservative motion to get rid of the streaming tax hike,
00:03:33.580 to not raise it from five to 15 percent one important news flash that i think canadians
00:03:39.100 ought to know is the message is this get ready for another liberal tax that's it the government
00:03:45.660 has already taxed your gas and they've taxed your groceries and they've taxed your capital
00:03:49.100 games and god knows they've taxed your income and now they're coming for your netflix that's
00:03:54.300 really what today's about the liberal appointed crtc an unelected unaccountable body which
00:04:00.380 regulates streaming services and digital content in this country just mandated the companies like
00:04:06.620 netflix like disney plus like prime video fork over 15 of revenues to ottawa and that's a 200
00:04:14.860 increase from where they were so if you're watching at home let's put just a number on this
00:04:21.100 and what it means for family so netflix earns netflix alone earns about 1.5 billion dollars
00:04:25.900 annually from canadian subscribers 15 of that is 225 um million and then passed on to consumers
00:04:35.740 that'll be potentially three or four bucks every single month um per household on top of everything
00:04:42.220 else the canadians pay and that might not sound like a lot of money but that's exactly where that
00:04:46.860 tax that ottawa's collecting is going to go although that actually is quite a bit and uh
00:04:52.620 because it's most people have like one, two or three streaming services. So that's like three
00:04:57.980 or four dollars compounded three times. So $12 extra per month, every month of the year. And
00:05:04.980 you could say, well, it's only $12 a month, you can't afford $12 a month. Like, well, not really,
00:05:10.060 when everything else has been going up in price as well. It's kind of a big deal for people who
00:05:15.200 are already having trouble making ends meet. But this argument was not persuasive to the liberals.
00:05:21.820 And that is why they voted down the conservative motion to scrap the tripling of the streaming tax.
00:05:29.100 This is from BlackLock's reporter.
00:05:30.660 They say Commons votes 193 to 134 in favor of tripling charges on video streaming services like Netflix to 15% of Canadian revenues.
00:05:41.520 And I just need to stop there and mention that 15% is insane because I believe that's on top of their corporate taxes.
00:05:50.700 maybe they don't pay corporate taxes, but that's still just an absurd amount of money to be paying
00:05:56.760 or to be charging a corporation that kind of barely operates in Canada. It's not like they're
00:06:03.600 using our electricity grid or anything like that. It's a service in America that you can access in
00:06:09.700 Canada. And they're saying, if any Canadians accessing it, you owe us 15%, possibly on top
00:06:14.960 of your corporate taxes and the sales taxes and all that other stuff. It's just gouging them in
00:06:21.720 order to subsidize the CBC. But of course, we now know that Carney has reversed it after he
00:06:29.320 and the rest of the liberal MPs voted in favor of tripling it. The conservatives put a motion to
00:06:36.160 them to get them on the record at their position. They said, no, screw you guys, we're going to 0.94
00:06:40.820 triple it anyways, no matter what your protests are. They tried to frame it as like, oh, my 0.98
00:06:45.760 goodness, the conservatives are in favor of Trump's America not having to pay the streaming tax.
00:06:52.140 And then they reverse themselves anyways. Like, come on, guys. And then, of course,
00:06:56.760 Mark Carney was chased down in the hallway and reporters asked him this doesn't quite this clip
00:07:02.660 doesn't quite get the question in. But reporters asked him, are you making a big concession?
00:07:06.980 Because Dominic LeBlanc, your trade representative for U.S. trade, just went down to Washington, and now suddenly the tax is being reversed, and this is a tax that the American government had been protesting heavily.
00:07:20.000 I now wonder if Bill C-22, the one that forces companies to give over your internet records, your data to the government, if that one's also now going to be reversed, because that's another one that the Americans have been protesting.
00:07:33.480 But Carney, after being asked if the reversal has anything to do with American pressure, just starts talking about how Canadians, you know, deserve to save money.
00:07:43.480 It is another step to reinforce affordability for Canadians.
00:07:47.700 This is not the time to raise the cost for Canadians.
00:07:51.620 When the CRTC takes decisions, as they did last summer, with respect to telecom and telecom sharing on broadband, which helped to lower costs for Canadians,
00:08:01.180 we're very much less supportive
00:08:02.780 but this is not the time to make Canadians
00:08:05.360 pay another $50
00:08:06.160 this isn't the time to make Canadians pay
00:08:09.080 another $50 a year for each streaming service
00:08:11.100 they use
00:08:11.560 okay well
00:08:14.320 why then
00:08:16.820 I'm not trying to be pedantic here
00:08:18.560 why then
00:08:20.140 did you vote against the conservative
00:08:23.200 motion to not
00:08:25.160 triple it
00:08:25.860 why
00:08:28.300 it stands to reason
00:08:30.980 that if you voted for it four days ago, justifying that this is going to help support Canadian
00:08:35.300 content, you should still be in favor of it a couple days later. But here is now, this is
00:08:42.460 actually giving a big win to the Bloc Québécois, who voted, of course, again, to in favor of
00:08:49.100 tripling the tax, but obviously they are still in favor of it. And this is really bad news for
00:08:54.200 Mark Carney, because he has Stephen Guilbeault leaving this summer. He represents a Montreal
00:08:59.840 riding that although Montreal is very liberal, his riding is actually very NDP and block two.
00:09:05.740 It's one of the few very divided ridings. A lot of the liberal ridings, they win with like 60%
00:09:11.080 of the vote. Stephen Kilbeau won with a very healthy margin in this last election, but in
00:09:16.560 the previous election, and that was his re-election, that was his first re-election in 2021 or his
00:09:21.680 second one, he only won with like 37% of the vote. He's leaving slagging the liberals saying they're
00:09:27.700 not doing good enough on the environment, which is a message that hurts the Liberals in that
00:09:31.880 Montreal riding. At the same time, the Liberals are saying that if Quebec voted to separate and
00:09:38.700 they had a majority, Mark Carney might not recognize it. And now he's reversing himself
00:09:44.840 for Donald Trump on the streaming tax hike, which does not play very well in Quebec,
00:09:50.660 where, of course, they rely heavily on media subsidies for their content.
00:09:55.580 Mr. Speaker, another betrayal of Quebec culture. On day two of Kuzma negotiations, the government is already asking the CRTC to abandon the 15% increase in royalties required of major online streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney Plus and Prime.
00:10:15.920 After abandoning the digital services tax, Ottawa is once again sacrificing funding for cultural creation
00:10:22.880 by allowing digital giants to avoid paying their fair share.
00:10:26.480 We're talking about $3.4 billion.
00:10:29.660 Does the Prime Minister know that he's supposed to defend our culture and not barter it away?
00:10:35.200 The Right Honourable Prime Minister.
00:10:38.260 Mr. Speaker, the government is starting by defending everyday Canadians.
00:10:45.280 we are focused on affordability this is a decision focused on affordability for families
00:10:54.260 in Quebec and families across Canada at the same time we are investing 600 million dollars more
00:11:02.580 in Canadian culture and in Quebec culture except that's not that's a crap excuse yes they are
00:11:11.400 canceling the tax hike, but they're still going to spend another $600 million just artificially
00:11:17.160 boosting Canadian content. The problem is that the typical voter in Montreal would rather strike at
00:11:24.100 the Americans with the tax than just get more money. That's the problem. And anyone who's more
00:11:29.740 on the fiscal side of the Liberal Party, you know, the business liberals, they're not happy to see
00:11:35.200 that the government's going to spend another $600 million out of nowhere to basically make
00:11:41.360 up for the lost revenues of this tax hike, and that they're spending on something completely
00:11:47.120 frivolous. Again, this is a perfect storm. Conservatives look right about trying to
00:11:51.960 save Canadians money with the Liberals having to reverse themselves and use the exact argument
00:11:57.080 that they previously rejected. The Liberals are looking bad in front of Quebec voters by
00:12:02.480 basically letting the Americans off of this tax and looking weak in front of Donald Trump.
00:12:06.900 basically wall-to-wall. It's bad for Carney. Looks weak in front of Trump. He should have
00:12:12.460 never implemented the tax in the first place because it's bad for Canadians and bad for
00:12:15.700 trade negotiations. He looks unpatriotic in front of Canadian elbows-up voters. And Quebec voters
00:12:22.720 are particularly mad because they're super anti-American. And this was effectively them
00:12:29.380 surrendering to Trump and being unwilling to make the American companies pay for Quebec content.
00:12:36.900 The Honourable Member for Belle Chambly.
00:12:39.560 Well, Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister had already abandoned the digital services tax
00:12:44.600 with no concession from Washington, not a single thing.
00:12:49.540 In doing so, he deprived the cultural sector of $1.4 billion a year.
00:12:53.080 Today, he's asking the CRTC to back down on the 15%
00:12:57.040 that would have been taxed on major online streaming platforms.
00:13:01.000 So that's $2 billion that would come from the United States.
00:13:06.140 He's depriving the cultural sector of billions of dollars, which he claims he can compensate with $600 million taken from taxpayers' pockets.
00:13:13.600 How can the prime minister justify that everyone is losing except for the American web giants?
00:13:20.380 And again, it's such a Quebec nationalistic and socialistic argument because these taxes, the digital services tax, which is, again, another one of those things where Carney was going to implement it.
00:13:34.100 And he doesn't care if Trump likes it or not.
00:13:35.880 And then he runs away at the last moment.
00:13:37.600 Same thing with this streaming tax hike.
00:13:40.040 The block is so left-wing.
00:13:42.960 They don't seem to understand when you implement a tax on a company, consumers pay for it.
00:13:48.240 The company doesn't just say, oh, well, I guess we're going to give them 15% of our
00:13:51.720 revenues and not even touch our service cost.
00:13:54.340 They're going to raise their service cost in Canada.
00:13:56.920 Why wouldn't they?
00:13:57.600 What, are they just going to go out of business for fun?
00:13:59.740 They're just going to operate in Canada at a loss for fun?
00:14:02.720 obviously not and so but but but the blocks see it as somehow they're taking something away
00:14:09.240 from american companies to support canadian content and that mark carney is like letting
00:14:15.480 the americans off without a punishment for the like nasty deed of providing streaming services
00:14:20.800 in canada that i'm sorry no canadian company is after offering other than cbc gem and goodness 0.98
00:14:27.140 don't watch it i don't know what to say if you watch it you will become stupider uh there's no
00:14:34.080 good streaming services in canada and we're going to tax the ones being provided into canada because 0.97
00:14:39.160 they're like dirty and american somehow but you can see the very awkward position that carney is
00:14:43.780 in and you can tell by his response he's dumping money on the problem he's having to agree with
00:14:49.320 the conservatives arguments in favor or against the tax now even though he previously voted in 0.88
00:14:54.580 favor of it and he looks absolutely pathetic when it comes to his progress on trade. Honorable 0.88
00:15:00.500 Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker, I have news for the member for Belle Chambly. Who pays for that tax
00:15:11.240 on streamers? Well, everyday people. Oh my goodness, he sounds like pure poly of. He previously
00:15:16.800 voted against this argument that Melissa Lantzman was just making. With increased streaming costs,
00:15:22.860 That's the truth. So we have chosen, we have chosen that we are going to focus on affordability to make sure that the cultural sector is supported and to focus on affordability for everyone.
00:15:41.200 The Honourable Member for Belle Chambly, he is letting $3.4 billion a year from the United States go away, and he's taking $600 million out of taxpayers' pockets.
00:15:54.100 By asking the CRTC to cancel the 15%, the Prime Minister is doing worse than capitulating.
00:15:59.800 He's validating the Americans' claim that Quebec's culture and the French language are a barrier to trade.
00:16:06.640 And by replacing those royalties with public funds, he's validating the Conservatives' criticism by making taxpayers foot the bill for the web giants.
00:16:16.120 The Prime Minister says...
00:16:18.640 Now I'm going to end it here because we don't need to see here any more of this interchange.
00:16:21.980 I just want to remind you guys of what the Laurier-Saint-Marie riding that Stephen Guilbeault represents currently looks like in terms of votes.
00:16:31.440 This is a vulnerable riding in a by-election.
00:16:34.120 because in a certain sense, Stephen Gilbeau was able to win it in the last election by such a
00:16:40.220 large margin, not only because the NDP effectively collapsed, as well as it was just a very
00:16:45.600 nationalistic election in favor of Cannes against the United States, but also Stephen Gilbeau is
00:16:51.560 left-wing enough that he's able to eat up a lot of NDP and block votes. I don't think Stephen
00:16:57.780 Gilbeau is exactly a separatist, but he's very much a Quebec nationalist, so he appeals to that
00:17:02.940 sort of Bloc Quebec voter. That's why the Bloc Quebec fell down. And he's so left-wing on the
00:17:07.400 environment, naturally a lot of New Democrats are very comfortable voting for him. So in 2025,
00:17:12.160 he won with 52% of the vote, what you would consider a safe liberal seat. But if we scroll
00:17:17.360 down to 2021, Stephen Gilbeau won with 37% of the vote to the New Democrats, 32%, and the Bloc got
00:17:25.000 20.4%. Now it shows you how left-wing Montreal is. The Conservatives got 3.36% even back in 2021
00:17:32.240 when the Liberals were weaker. In 2019, Steve Gilbeau won with 41% of the vote. And in 2015,
00:17:39.780 it was an NDP riding. Before that, it was still an NDP in 2011. And it was Gilles Decep and the
00:17:46.420 Bloc Québécois who held the riding back in 2008 and for many elections before that.
00:17:53.140 This is a riding in a by-election the Liberals can lose. They're losing their left-wing star
00:17:58.020 candidate who is an environmentalist saying that the liberals are portraying the climate on the way
00:18:02.460 out. The liberals look weak on Trump right now from a left-wing Montrealer perspective, and they
00:18:09.080 have just kicked all the Quebec nationalists in the face when Carney made those Clarity Act
00:18:13.780 comments saying that, yes, even if a separatist referendum went through with 50% plus one of the
00:18:20.080 vote, he would not recognize that majority because he believes the Clarity Act says it must be a clear
00:18:25.340 majority, which in his mind means it must be like some abstract number higher than even 50 plus 1%.
00:18:32.880 There are a lot of people he is strategically going around taking off right now in a way that
00:18:38.800 I don't think Mark Carney realizes yet. The same thing is actually happening in British Columbia
00:18:43.540 as well. And I'll be covering that tomorrow in a federal polling video, because right now,
00:18:50.020 because of all of the actions that Carney has taken on the pipeline. He's fueling the rise of
00:18:56.580 the Avi Lewis NDP in BC. Now, overall, the pipeline is very popular in Canada. The problem is, is that
00:19:04.760 there are so many hard left environmentalists in the liberal base doing something sensible, like
00:19:10.640 trying to work towards a pipeline, even though Carney's not really trying to build a pipeline,
00:19:14.540 he's pretending he wants to build a pipeline. That's enough to alienate a large portion of the
00:19:21.140 left-wing flank of the Liberal Party to the point the Conservatives could win the by-election
00:19:26.400 in North Vancouver Capilano to replace Jonathan Wilkinson. A lot like Stephen Gilbeau, Jonathan
00:19:32.480 Wilkinson can make it a safe riding for the Liberals. Before him, it was a conservative riding.
00:19:37.620 Yeah, there were some Liberals who held it previously as well, but it was mostly conservative
00:19:41.760 of writing before Jonathan Wilkinson. And in a by-election, anything can happen, especially when
00:19:47.280 the polls are shifting away from your government in that particular region. Anyways, so with all
00:19:53.220 that being said, thank you guys for watching this video. Sorry if it was a bit more rambly. There
00:19:58.420 was a lot of things I was trying to connect together all in one video. The streaming tax
00:20:03.180 kind of rolled back, how the blocs reacting to it, how the conservatives are reacting to it,
00:20:07.880 how this makes us look on trade, as well as the general environment of the summer by-elections.
00:20:14.200 I actually had to record the start of this video like 50,000 times, a little bit of a peek in the
00:20:20.220 back end of the channel. Every time I try and say the little intro of, hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here
00:20:26.320 and welcome back, I mess it up so many times because you start to say it in such a way where
00:20:32.900 you become a caricature of yourself and you're like hey guys why play pool here and welcome back
00:20:38.800 and it's like oh my goodness why stop it and it requires me to literally re-record that part for
00:20:44.960 like 30 minutes straight until I get it right and I get the next minute right to the point where I'm
00:20:50.800 not like you know falling all over myself because who wants to get like a minute into a video and
00:20:55.520 I'm already stumbling so I always try and make like the first two or three minutes perfect like
00:20:59.600 right after I tell people to like the video, that's when I'm usually home free and I can keep
00:21:03.800 going. But if I mess up before that point, we go all the way back and we do it again to the point
00:21:09.040 where I almost want to pick up my coffee cup here and just like throw it against the back wall of
00:21:12.740 this room. Anyways, anyways, I'm done whining. With all that being said, thank you guys for
00:21:19.140 watching. Like, share, and subscribe. Consider hitting the join button and becoming a channel
00:21:24.060 member and I'll see you guys all next time.