I'll let my colleague David go into the tax details.
What the officials came to speak to you about is the activity of these mining pool companies, their relationship to the bitcoin network, the transactions that happen on that network, and the bitcoin companies that verify and secure those transactions. That entire activity Finance is referencing happens outside of Canada. It doesn't happen in Canada. The Canadian businesses that provide the computing support for this industry and that make bitcoin money possible are in Canada. Their clients are outside of Canada. They are creating a service. They are creating a supply of clean, high-computing services that they are selling to a non-resident of Canada. They know exactly who their client is. Their client is the mining pool company. Their client pays them for the services they provide.
What this legislation does is confuse the whole thing. It tries to combine this Canadian activity—the discrete computing services—with broader questions about how, from a regulatory point of view, we should treat the bitcoin network and the people who transact on that network, and what the regulatory oversight should be. These are all perfectly legitimate questions the government should grapple with. There should be a framework of law and regulation that addresses these issues.
The issue of GST and these companies is very simple and clear. They're creating computing services. They're selling those computing services to a non-resident company. Those services should be rated zero for GST purposes, and they should be able to claim their input tax credits.