It’s actually not that complicated. If you want to sell a service in Canada, and it’s taxable, you should collect it. It’s that simple. Netflix, for its part, can collect it from customers, or pay it out of their own pockets. But yes, they should be subject to it, just like one pays taxes to their cable company, or when they buy a movie ticket at a theater. 

I live in Ohio now, where taxes weren’t being collected on a ton of digital services - things like Netflix/hulu, also email marketing software, etc. earlier this year, that changed. So now, all that went up. It wasn’t a taxable item before, and it is now. This is a service being sold in Ohio, but essentially, most of those types of companies don’t have assets or a base in my state. 

Look, I’ll admit I was was fine with not having to pay tax on these things for years. But let’s be honest, just because we don’t like paying taxes, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be collected.