Do I file GST/HST registration even if no tax is owed?
Identifier or registration obligations of this kind are generally required on the facts rather than on the tax result, so a nil position does not remove one. Non-resident suppliers, platform operators and digital-service businesses whose Canadian sales cross the registration test.
What happens if I have missed GST/HST registration for several years?
Missed years are dealt with as a package rather than one at a time, because the route chosen for the first year affects the relief available for the rest. We map the years and the obligations before anything is filed.
Is GST/HST registration the same as the other reports I already file?
No. Sales-tax registration for a non-resident business supplying goods, services or digital products into Canada. Satisfying a different obligation, even one covering the same accounts or entity, does nothing for this one.
Do I have to register for GST/HST if I have no Canadian office?
Possibly. The registration test is not about premises. It asks whether the business is carrying on business in Canada and what the supply itself looks like, so a supplier with no office, no staff and no address here can still be inside the net while another with a Canadian mailing address sits outside it. The factors are practical ones: where the contracts are made, where the work is performed, where the goods are delivered, who solicits the customers and where any inventory sits. Answer those before you look at any form, because the registration route you are eligible for follows from that answer.
What counts as carrying on business in Canada for GST/HST?
It is a weighing exercise rather than a single test, and no one factor settles it. The examiner looks at where the supply is made and where the activities that produce it happen: contracting, solicitation, delivery, performance, inventory, bank accounts, agents acting here. A business can have several of these in Canada and still be outside the test, or very few and be inside it. Because the answer decides both whether you must register and which route is open to you, it is worth writing the analysis down at the outset, with the facts it rests on, rather than reconstructing it two years later under review.
Can a non-resident business recover Canadian tax on its own costs?
That depends on the registration route taken, not on the amount of tax paid. One route carries the ability to recover input tax on Canadian costs; another is easier to operate and gives no recovery at all. A business with meaningful Canadian costs — warehousing, fulfilment, contractors, professional fees, imported inventory — can therefore be worse off on the simpler route than on the fuller one, even though the compliance burden is lighter. The choice is not cosmetic and it is difficult to unpick after the fact, so it should be modelled from your real cost base before anything is filed.
My Canadian customer says I must charge GST — are they right?
They may be, but a customer's view is not the test. What matters is whether you are required or entitled to be registered and how the supply is characterised, which depends on what you are actually supplying and where it is treated as being made. Customers raise this because an unregistered supplier leaves them holding a cost they cannot recover, so the question is often commercial pressure rather than analysis. The right response is to settle your own position on the evidence, tell the customer where you stand in writing, and register if the analysis says so rather than because an invoice was queried.
Do I still register if I only sell to Canadian businesses, not consumers?
The nature of the customer matters to the analysis, but it does not remove the question. What changes between business and consumer sales is how the tax is accounted for and by whom, and which registration routes are realistically open to you. A supplier selling only to registered businesses may have a different exposure from one selling to the public, yet both need the same first step: identify the supply, work out where it is made, then test the carrying-on-business question. Deciding you are out of scope because your customers are companies is an assumption, and it is the one most often overturned on review.
Which GST/HST registration route should a non-resident supplier choose?
Treat it as a modelling exercise, not a form-filling one. Set out your Canadian sales, your Canadian costs, who your customers are and how much administrative capacity you have, then compare what each route does to that picture. The fuller route carries more obligations and opens input tax recovery; the lighter route is simpler to operate and closes it. Where Canadian costs are significant, the arithmetic usually favours the fuller route despite the extra work. Where there are almost no Canadian costs and the sales are to the public, the lighter route often wins. Do the comparison before registering.
Is GST/HST the only indirect tax a non-resident has to think about?
No. Indirect tax in Canada is federal and provincial at once: GST or HST depending on the province, plus a separate provincial sales tax in several of them and Quebec's own regime, each with its own registration test. A non-resident selling into Canada can be required to register under more than one of them for the same sale. Which ones apply turns on where the customer is, what is being supplied, and whether the supply is digital — so the registration analysis comes before the first invoice.
Does foreign employment income create RRSP room?
Only where it is earned income reported on a Canadian return. RRSP room is built from earned income that Canada sees, so a non-resident year of foreign salary generally builds none, and foreign tax paid does not create room of its own. This is why people returning to Canada after years abroad find their contribution room much smaller than the years elapsed suggest, and why the notice of assessment is the only reliable statement of it. See returning to Canada after years abroad.
