Québec Sales tax

Jean-Francois Mezei jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca
Tue Mar 27 22:10:51 UTC 2018


Not quite networking but probably relevant.

The Canadian province of Québec just introduced a new budget with
basically the intent to force foreign digital companies who sell
services to Québekers to collect the local value added sales tax and
remit those to the QC government.

The goal is to capture tax from Netflix who has so far escaped taxation
in Canada by having no legal/physical presence in Canada, no cache
servers of its own etc. Netflix does not currently collect province
information from customers (or any address info for that matter).

They based many of their arguments on an OECD study (which ironically
the Canadian federal government says is not completed yet (as excuse for
not proceeding with similar tax).

So foreign digital services will be required to require subscibers enter
AND VALIDATE their address so that they have an accurate province field
(validation remains to be finalized), and IF they sell more than $30,000
to Québec residents, will be required to self register with QC
government to collect local sales tax (and remit to QC government).

The Québec budget expects that validation of address will be based on IP
address geolocation or custoemrs send paper bills to prove place of
residence.

(Although requiring full address/phone number and sendint this to credit
card network for authorization might constitute a better means to
validate address).

I suspect the big winners will be VPN services in the USA :-)

Because many ISPs span multiple provinces, IP geolocation generally
points to their HQ address, not necessarily the province of the
subscriber. (This is especially true for DSL in bell Canada wholesale
where currently a single point of connection between Bell and ISP allows
full reach of all of its DSL territory in QC/ON. For Cable, ISPs require
different IP pools for Rogers in Ontario and Vidéotron in Ontario (with
a couple of exceptions where Vidéotron has service in a couple fo
Ontario towns). In Western Canada, things are harder as Shaw serves BC,
AB, SASK and MB.



More information about the NANOG mailing list