Why I’ll Never Pay a Netflix Tax in Canada

I hate to dry snitch on myself, but just like millions of my fellow Canadians, I frequently and unabashedly watch American versions of digital streaming services through less than legal or ethical means. [Although to be clear, I don’t consider it stealing, I’m just correcting a manufacturing error.] I do it, not because I love breaking the law, though I do get a rush everytime I navigate my way past one of those “content not available in your country” messages, but because what’s available to us is a laughably shitty version of what’s available almost anywhere else in the world.

This discrepancy, while already irksome, becomes particularly galling in light of rumours that the Liberal government is now considering adding a sales tax to foreign digital streaming services. This is different from the “content tax” that was being debated previously, which would charge some of these services a fee that would go towards creating Canadian content. While not a terrible idea, that notion was met with fierce backlash, with even ol’Stevey Harper promising his government would, “never tax Netflix or other online streaming services.”

But unlike the ‘content tax,’ this newly discussed sales tax would not be channeled into creating programming, but funneled to Ottawa to do annoying things like build roads and hospitals. Both of which are great, I guess, but they won’t fix the fact that Canadian Netflix has seventeen seasons of Pit Bulls and Parolees and honestly very little else for $7.99 a month.

An argument can, and is being made, however that a sales tax would at least correct a perceived advantage that companies like Amazon and Netflix have against similar homegrown services like say, Bell’s Crave TV. A briefing note about the sales tax for Heritage Minister Melanie Joly put it this way, “The lack of sales-tax collection “not only represents a significant loss of potential tax revenue for government, but it can also place domestic digital suppliers at an unfair competitive disadvantage.”

Sounds logical on paper, yes, but I have Crave TV. And while it has a large library of content, it’s so fucking hard to navigate and actually find anything you’d want to watch under the layers of Letterkenny, that it can in no way blame a tax for better, more user-friendly services like Netflix cutting into their subscriber pickup. A sales tax can’t fix poor UX.

And our domestic services DO need fixing. Despite being nearly a third the size of Canada, the Cayman Islands, Curucao, and French Guyana have more videos available to them on their regional Netflix than we do here. And it feels particularly ludicrous for us to get a watered-down version of what’s in the US given that the majority of our population lives essentially at the border and our popular cultures have only the slightest variances, most notably exemplified by our lower budget productions and how we pronounce the word ‘about.’ So why should we pay the exact same amount for a service that, just an hour south has 1,200 more available videos and incrementally more seasons of Law & Order: SVU? It is, as the scholars would say, total fucking bullshit.

In the end a sales tax is unlikely because most OECD countries don’t charge a sales tax on digital goods and services, and given that the US doesn’t have a federal tax, it would be difficult to force the companies behind the majority of these services to comply to one here.

But I actually think Canadians are willing to pay more for Amazon and Netflix.

Even at an extra $2-3/month, most of us would likely shell out for an equal service to the US to avoid the hassle of now having to find a consistent proxy service that works around Netflix’s detectors. In fact, I was previously paying an extra $4 month for an unblocker just to make paying for Netflix up here, “worth it.”

What I will never fucking do though, is pay more, whether in the form of a content or sales tax, for an embarrassingly bare offering that in no way matches what I’ve come to expect from a full-menu subscription service. What I’d really like to see coming out of these Heritage meetings is a better understanding of the modern digital consumer. We aren’t content pirates looking to steal everything we can get our hands on. We’re just acutely aware of the true market offering and not willing to accept knockoffs at a markup. So, Melanie Joly, I invite you to come hang out with me for a week, catch up on a shitload of whatever’s on HBO Go (yeah I liberate that too) and readjust how you treat Canadian consumers.

You can take our lives, but you will never take our hotspot shields!

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