We're not saying to shut out foreign e-commerce. You can't do that, but at the minimum you need to level the playing field.
In Uber's case, for example, Uber drivers were legally required to remit GST if they had an income above a certain level—I think it's $30,000 or something like that—but Uber would not let them collect any cash or charge anything above what the Uber rate was. If they were going to be legal, they had to pay that out of their own pockets.
It's very good that the Liberal government has taken steps to correct this problem in the case of Uber, but the question I asked was, what about other areas? For example, there's Airbnb. It's one thing when it's a family that has an extra room or whatever and so on, but in the big cities, such as Toronto and Vancouver, a majority of the Airbnb places are businesses. They buy a whole condo and rent out all the rooms in the condo apartment. It is providing much more direct competition, and it doesn't help a small Canadian family that is trying to make ends meet by renting out a room. They should be required to pay at least the GST.
We argue that businesses should also pay corporate taxes, especially the big ones like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. These companies are really huge in terms of the Canadian market.
Globally, there is a new consensus that value-added taxes should be paid in the country where there are sales, no matter what the platform. Similarly, corporate income taxes should be paid on the profits generated in that country. That's the new international consensus. The OECD is recommending this. It's time that Canada got with the times.
If we want to support Canadian businesses, they usually have to be able to get going in the Canadian market before they can move globally. It's not fair if their competitors here in Canada don't have to pay taxes and they do. We need to level the playing field so that Canadian companies will have a better chance of establishing e-commerce competence and will be able to move into the global market.