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“No one likes paying extra sales taxes, but I think we can understand why the government would adopt that policy,” he said.

He thinks it’s inevitable the government will go the same route and extend the sales tax to digital services like Netflix, which generally don’t pay sales taxes because their operations are based elsewhere. (Some customers may pay HST for Netflix if, for instance, they buy the service through Apple TV, which charges tax since Apple has a physical presence in Canada.)

“This is not the same as mandating Netflix pay a percentage of their revenue to fund CanCon (Canadian content) in the way that a broadcaster or a broadcasting distribution undertaking would,” Geist said. He supports the former but opposes the CanCon tax, pointing to a recent Canadian Media Producers Association report that found foreign services spend more than Canadian distributors on financing English TV programming.

“People are investing in producing in Canada, and they’re doing it without any legislated mandate to do so,” he said.

Consumer advocacy group OpenMedia agrees, calling a sales tax a “sensible alternative” that most consumers would understand.

“It’s infinitely preferable to a monthly tax on peoples’ Internet bills or a tax that would target Netflix or other online delivery platforms,” OpenMedia’s David Christopher said.

But it will be more complicated to implement given the variety of online services to which a sales tax might apply. While Netflix is an obvious target with an estimated 5 million Canadian subscribers, there are questions over how big an online service must be for the cost of collecting and enforcing sales taxes to outweigh the actual revenue generated.