 | | | | This is your Marketplace Watchdog for Friday, July 04, 2025.
By: Dexter McMillan
| | |  | | | Raise prices on sugary drinks, alcohol and tobacco by 50%, WHO suggests
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The World Health Organization is pushing countries to raise the prices of sugary drinks, alcohol and tobacco by 50 per cent over the next 10 years through taxation, its strongest backing yet for taxes to help tackle chronic public health problems.
The United Nations health agency said the move would help cut consumption of the products, which contribute to diseases like diabetes and some cancers, as well as raising money at a time when development aid is shrinking and public debt rising.
"Health taxes are one of the most efficient tools we have," said Jeremy Farrar, WHO assistant-director general of health promotion and disease prevention and control. "It's time to act."
WHO launched the push, billed as the "3 by 35" initiative, at the UN Finance for Development conference in Seville, Spain.
WHO said that its tax plan could raise $1 trillion US by 2035, based on evidence from health taxes in countries such as Colombia and South Africa.
WHO has backed tobacco taxes and price increases for decades, and has called for taxes on alcohol and sugary drinks in recent years. But this is the first time it has suggested a target price increase for all three products. Read more.
| | |  | | | Is the romance with dating apps over? Big cuts at Bumble, Match raise questions
| Mass layoffs at dating app provider Bumble are the latest sign that more people are splitting from the high-tech way of making connections.
The Texas-based online dating platform disclosed in a securities filing last week that it plans to lay off about one-third of its workforce, amounting to some 240 employees, with an anticipated savings of about $40 million US.
Bumble reported a total revenue of about $247 million in its most recent first-quarter earnings, down almost eight per cent from the same period a year ago.
"Bumble, like the online dating industry itself, is at an inflection point," Bumble CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd said in a note to employees. The company has been "rebuilding" in recent months, which "requires hard decisions," the note said.
A month earlier, Texas-based Match Group — which owns the dating apps Tinder, Hinge and OKCupid — announced plans to cut 13 per cent of its workforce, the company's first big move since CEO Spencer Rascoff took over in February.
Read more from CBC's Kevin Maimann.
| | |  | | | New supply management law won't save the system from Trump, experts say
| A new law meant to protect supply management might not be enough to shield the system in trade talks with a Trump administration bent on eliminating it, trade experts say.
The Bloc Québécois’s recently passed Bill C-202 essentially forbids supply management from being used as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations by preventing the foreign affairs minister from making certain commitments.
"It's certainly more difficult to strike a deal with the United States now with the passage of this bill that basically forces Canada to negotiate with one hand tied behind its back," said William Pellerin, a trade lawyer and partner at the firm McMillan LLP.
"Now that we've removed the digital service tax, dairy and supply management is probably the No. 1 trade irritant that we have with the United States. That remains very much unresolved."
When U.S. President Donald Trump briefly paused trade talks with Canada on June 27 over the digital services tax — shortly before Ottawa capitulated by dropping the tax — he zeroed in on Canada's system of supply management.
In a social media post, Trump called Canada a "very difficult country to TRADE with, including the fact that they have charged our Farmers as much as 400% Tariffs, for years, on Dairy Products."
Canada can charge about 250 per cent tariffs on U.S. dairy imports over a set quota established by the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). The International Dairy Foods Association, which represents the U.S. dairy industry, said in March that the U.S. has never come close to reaching those quotas, though the association also said that's because of other barriers Canada has erected. Read more.
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