NDP to lobby government on foreign digital sales, ad taxes

The federal NDP said it will enter the new parliamentary session with a focus on pressuring the government to right wrongs they say have been committed by allowing foreign internet companies to skirt domestic taxes. Federal leader of the party Jagmeet Singh, who does not currently sit in Parliament but plans to run in a B.C. by-election, pledged to apply “the same rules to all, no favour for friends or the privileged” when talking about the likes of Netflix Inc., Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc., and Twitter Inc. He made the announcement alongside the party’s Quebec caucus on Tuesday. Many of the measures are not new; some have a distinctly Quebec lean. They include treating Netflix and other over-the-top (OTT) services as cable companies and taxing them on profits they make in the country, and especially in Quebec, which the government refused to do when then-Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly announced her Creative Canada strategy that included a promise from Netflix to invest $500 million in the country. Speaking of which, the campaign will also ask that the government not make deals like those with Netflix without consulting with Quebec. The federal government, going back to the years under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, continues to decline to tax the streaming services, which irks Quebec. Last year, the province pledged to implement such a tax, and included it in its 2018 budget. However, news publication The Logic reported Wednesday that Facebook will begin collecting sales taxes on ad purchases made in its physical offices. The CRTC touched on some of those sensitivities when it released a government-requested report urging the feds to get foreign OTT services to make “equitable” contributions to the communications sector as a whole, which don’t necessarily mean a monetary contribution. The campaign will also include lobbying the government to “close the loophole” in section 19 of the income tax act that allows businesses to deduct taxes on foreign internet advertisement purchases. That issue was raised by the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting group, which managed to coax a senate hearing on the matter. The senate committee on transport and communications then released a report urging the government to study the matter further. "The preferential treatment received by these foreign platforms threaten our small and medium-sized businesses, our artists, our culture and our French language, our media and the financing of our social services,” Singh said in a Tuesday press release. “By tackling these preferential treatments, the federal government would recover several billion dollars a year,” he added. Parliament is back in session on Sep. 17.

NDP to lobby government on foreign digital sales, ad taxes

Brief | August 29, 2018

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