Checking out at Costco

A couple of things I want to talk about before we get to that is we've been contacted by a And what does that mean for Canadians investors? I mean, we don't have very many U.S.

investors, but we can certainly talk about the impact that a lot of Canadians are worried about, which has been in the papers, is are there going to be higher taxes for me on my U.S. and foreign holdings as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill? I would say, A, it hasn't been passed yet, so that's no point really talking about it yet.

B, it looks like there's an out for Canada to be able to negotiate that withholding tax lower by reducing some tax that Canada has placed on U.S. big tech companies.

And C, most importantly, we don't really own a lot of U.S. companies for their dividends.

And so right now, Ernest, I believe there's a withholding tax treaty with Canon in the U.S.

I believe it's 15% on taxable accounts.

So not every single account that you have where you own U.S. securities would your dividend be taxed.

And keep in mind, this is your dividend, not your capital gain or an ongoing cost.

The income that you receive could be potentially taxed at a higher rate.

Right now, I believe it's taxed at 15%.

So let's say you get $1,000 a year of dividends from Microsoft.

Right now, it's $850 net to Canadians in a taxable account.

The proposal, I believe, is to increase that withholding tax 5% a year over the next seven years to get the withholding tax up to 50%.

Yeah, I think it's not exactly clear what the rate is going to be or how it is implemented in the end.

Exactly.

So we are talking theoreticals here.

I guess the worst case scenario is seven years from now, your Microsoft dividend, which is $1,000, maybe you'll only get $500.

Unclear as to that, whether the withholding tax will still only be applied to taxable accounts or non-taxable accounts.

We don't know.

I think I've said it before on the podcast.

You should expect to be taxed higher going forward.

We know that Canada and the US and all the other countries are sitting on trillions of dollars of debts and interest rates haven't come down enough to make that go away.

And more spending to come in Canada and the US, we expect.

So those that have higher wealth should be expecting to see higher taxation going forward.

And this is just part of it.