Darpan News Desk The Canadian Press, 02 Mar, 2022 11:45 AM
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Seven simple words from Joe Biden's state of the union speech have some in Canada breathing a little bit more easily this morning.
The U.S. president renewed his call for tax credits to lower the cost of electric vehicles, but made no mention of preferring American-made cars and trucks.
That is encouraging to some in the Canadian auto sector, considering the strident Buy American sentiment in other parts of Tuesday's hour-long speech.
Biden originally proposed a suite of incentives that prioritized EVs assembled in the U.S. with union labour — a plan that would kneecap Canadian automakers.
The federal government in Ottawa has been pressing the U.S. ever since to drop that condition, or provide an exemption for Canadian-made vehicles.
Still, no one is quite ready to exhale, insisting that they need to know more about the president's plan to know for sure if Canada is out of the woods.
Biden plans stiff tax penalties for companies that manufacture U.S.-bound products outside the country and a crackdown on those that use offshoring to avoid paying taxes at home.
If elected, Biden said, he would impose stiff new tax penalties on companies that manufacture U.S.-bound products outside the country, create incentives for keeping jobs on U.S. soil and close what he called "Trump loopholes" that allow companies engaged in offshoring to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
A spokesperson for AstraZeneca, via a statement said that the company’s “standard review process triggered a pause to vaccination to allow review of safety data.”
Prosecutors, defence lawyers and District Judge Theodore Chuang gathered today via conference call to set deadlines for the government's response to the motions and to set a hearing date.
Thursday’s report comes nearly two years after a Chinese scientist shocked the world by revealing he’d helped make the first gene-edited babies using a tool called CRISPR, which enables DNA changes or “edits” that can pass to future generations.