Leave Canada Now

| | | | |

In January 2005, the Canada Revenue Agency has ruled Level Extreme to tax its foreign customers, considered by Level Extreme as one of worst ruling ever done on a Canadian company. Level Extreme generates 90% of its income coming form the international market. See why a problem in the Canadian tax legislation, which omits that intangible properties should be zero-rated for non residents, has caused a severe situation making the ability for a Canadian based company to make business in e-commerce practically impossible.

Overview

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you and everyone else you know agree on an issue but just cannot anything about it? If this is the case, or if you would be interested to hear something in regards to that, we invite you to take a few minutes to read about the issue of Level Extreme VS The Canadian Government.

As many of you already know, Level Extreme, a Canadian based e-commerce provider, has been confronted against the Canadian Government since January 2005. This is an issue which already made the national news. The problem is really serious and need to be addressed at the highest level of the Canadian tax legislation.

Many parties have already expressed their support to Level Extreme in the last two years. This includes parties from various areas such as political representatives, educational institutions, clients and suppliers. Complaints on this issue came from all over the world and have been initiated to various entities such as the Canadian embassies, the US Department of Commerce, the Canada Revenu Agency and the Canada GST Ruling Department.

Everything you need to know about it

The facts, the timeframe, lots of comments, scanned of newspaper's articles and other related content can all be found in those three documents that have been released on the corporate site:

Leave Canada now

Since the last two years, Canada has been seen as a real joke on the Internet in regards to e-commerce as if we are a country which does not know anything about how tax should be managed when a company does business with foreign customers.

I just cannot see how in 2006 young entrepreneurs or anyone else with the desire to build new infrastructure in the e-commerce business could do business in Canada. I strongly recommend to leave the country in favor of building those infrastructures elsewhere in the world. I do not believe one could take the chance of setting up such a company and a few years later receive a letter from the government who suddenly decided to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars of uncollected tax in regards to invoices made to international customers.

This is no kindergarten stuff. We are talking about a national business image to the face of the world. We are talking about severe Canadian restrictions that penalizes its own entities and put them at a competitive disadvantage against the rest of the world making such business impossible to be done from a Canadian based company. This is a serious situation which should be addressed now. In the meantime, I would strongly recommend an exile in favor of offshore setups, thus outside of Canada, which usually means a change of citizenship.

What about a reverse situation?

This came at several occasions so far since the debut of this issue. If you live or would live in Montreal, for example, how would you feel to have to buy a software from the Internet and be taxed the California state tax, assuming the supplier would be in Los Angeles. The only think that could explain such taxation would be to be billed from a Canadian branch from that supplier, if one would ever exist. But, in general, this is not the case. So, as we do not have to pay a tax when purchasing a foreign service from the Internet, why should we be forced to charge such a tax to our foreign customers?

I am pretty sure that if the person who delivered this ruling would be confronted to such a situation, that he would revise his position on this entire issue. I think we can easily say that one could be influenced in his decision when he has to face it first.

What can you do to help?

We request help from all of our customers as well as all others interested in this topic to fill sign the petition and to also comment on the issue. You can find the links to those two items from the top of the site or form the main page. This would greatly help us in our quest to have this situation rectified.