Policy Forum: Carrying On About Carrying On Business: A Response to "The GST/HST Obligations of Non-Resident E-Commerce Firms"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Non-resident suppliers of digital products and services are not required to collect and remit goods and services tax (GST)/harmonized sales tax (HST) if they are not "carrying on business" in Canada. The term "carrying on business" in Canada is not defined in the legislation. Leaving aside policy arguments in favour of, or against, requiring such non-resident suppliers without a physical presence in Canada to register, the author of this article considers whether the current legal framework should be reinterpreted to require such suppliers to become registered for GST/HST on the basis of a purely digital presence. He addresses these issues by considering the textual, contextual, and purposive meaning of the term "carrying on business" (and its permutations) in the Excise Tax Act (Canada) (ETA). He concludes that while developments in other areas of law, such as conflict-of-laws jurisprudence, may expand the common-law meaning of "carrying on business" in a jurisdiction to include having a purely digital presence, the interpretive framework particular for tax statutes in Canada, and the specific use of the term in the ETA itself, lead to the conclusion that a specific change in law would be the more appropriate way to impose registration and collection obligations on such non-resident suppliers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".