I'm glad you raised that question. Our union actually represents a number of people in the media and broadcasting industry, both public and private. It has found that a lot of its business advertising dollars have gone outside of Canada, to Google, Facebook, and other companies that run e-commerce platforms.
I was glad the federal government introduced a tax—or applied the GST—to Uber. Most people don't realize it, but Uber is a massive tax avoidance scheme. It's based in the Netherlands and avoids tax on all different levels.
Most Canadians probably also don't know that GST and sales taxes are not applied to imports of digital services, so that can cover a whole lot of different e-commerce or online platforms. If the producer of that service is based in Canada in any sort of way, then the sales taxes and GST apply, so it's a clear bias against Canadian producers in this vast expanding area, and it's caused a lot of disruption in the broadcast industry. If somebody produces an app in Canada, that will be taxed—it's subject to GST and sales taxes—but if it's produced in some other country, it's not taxed, so it's a clear bias.
It's hard to get all those figures. You had a question about the impact of it. We figure there's at least $1 billion or maybe $2 billion in revenue. More importantly, we're losing jobs, and it's weakening Canadian businesses, so I hope this is something the government will also act on, and that the CFIB and others will be active on.
A lot of other countries have moved on this issue, and it's time for Canada to do so as well.