Finance committee  I'll make a quick comment on that, and maybe you can walk through the legislative proposal. What this sector is doing right now is building the infrastructure for high-performance computing. Today, the economics of supplying that computing power to companies that use it to mine

Finance committee  The competitive imbalance is created because of the different provincial and federal taxes. HST jurisdictions tend to be closer to 15%. For non-HST or jurisdictions with no sales tax, it would be 5%. To be clear, if this law is passed as is, everywhere GST is charged, people wo

Finance committee  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

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Ste-Marie. An interesting aspect of this proposal is that it seems to run entirely counter to the government's laudable efforts to combat climate change. Not to take anything away from the businesses that are operating in Alberta—they do great work as we

Finance committee  Thank you, Chair, and thank you, committee members, for having us here to speak with you today. My name is Daniel Brock. I'm a partner at the Canadian law firm Fasken. I'm joined by David Robertson from EY Law. Together, we are advising an industry coalition representing more th

Industry committee  It's best to think of it.... This is computing services.

Industry committee  It's like providing services to the cloud. Those computing services are taxable. They're taxable on the provision of them, and they're used for all sorts of purposes. The work of digital asset mining is the providing of computer services. They are high-end, specialized and ener

Industry committee  You're paying taxes on inputs. When you provide those services, you're charging tax.

Industry committee  Yes. That's correct.

Industry committee  We're using the GST, of course. The creation of the coin is taxed. Corporate taxes and other taxes are paid by these businesses, but on the goods and services tax, you wouldn't be claiming that tax on the creation of the coin on our model. It would ultimately be on the provision

Industry committee  It's not on the trading of the coin; when the coin is used to purchase services, those purchases are taxed.

Industry committee  I was just going to say that in the Ontario context it's mostly anecdotal, so research needs to be done on this as well. If you can imagine, for hydro power, Ontario, unlike Quebec or B.C., doesn't have the capacity to store power. It has to shed power and sell it at discounted

Industry committee  The precious metal is a physical store of value. Cryptocurrency is a digital virtual store of value, but it's every bit as real.

Industry committee  That's right.

Industry committee  Two-thirds of the global gold supply goes into bars and ends up as a store of value in a vault somewhere, but one-third of the world's gold supply ends up in jewellery. The gold value of jewellery is probably a small portion of its value. Jewellery is taxable as a work of art or