a3camero

I'm the author of that presentation (and surprised to see it on HN this morning!). What would you add to this or change? I may do a follow-up to it.

And if you like the slides, there will be a free video of the actual presentation online soon.

A search engine for the world's laws: global-regulation.com. It has over 800,000 machine translated laws.

Two person company in Toronto. One dev (me). Lots of big universities are clients, currently trying to expand to more corporate clients.

We charge customers according to the purchasing power of their country so it's cheap for developing countries. We are trying to aggregate all world legislation, convert it to English, and make it available to everyone.

Cabs also often don't give receipts with HST numbers on them. So presumably they're not reporting the HST they may or may not be collecting too.

Although you can sign up for Bizspark (or if you have a startup: Bizspark Plus) and use quite a bit for free.

Yup. It runs on Microsoft Cognitive Services: https://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2016/09/26/powered-by-m...

My previous comment was a bit harsh on CanLII. They actually do have an API for building some limited types of applications: http://developer.canlii.org/docs. But certainly not the sort of free and open access that a developer would want for building something like a search engine.

There are many others: http://www.saflii.org/ (Southern African countries) http://www.paclii.org/ (Pacific Island countries)

Cities pass "bylaws" that affect their municipality. In Canada municipalities are more limited in their lawmaking powers than cities in some other countries.

Bylaws are hard to lookup and are city-specific.

It is free-ish. It's free to use but there are restrictive licensing terms that prevent anyone from building anything with it: http://www.canlii.org/en/info/terms.html.

My blog post on this topic: https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/ and https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/canlii-licensing-terms/.

You can also create a normalized system that aggregates all of the local systems together. And this also applies to international law (assuming you're talking about treaties) because there's a treaty and then there's the national implementing legislation in all of the treaty countries.

I'm the CTO of Global-Regulation.com which is the search service with the most number of countries (78) and machine translated laws. We are often described by clients as the "Google of laws" but there are huge differences. Getting to Google-level search, where the engine understands your intent, is very challenging. People often search for industry terms like "SAR reporting" and what they want is Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR). A Google-like engine would need to understand what the query means from an industry point of view (since the terms often don't actually appear in legislation) and then translate that to the specific term used in each country. This is far from trivial and requires looking at secondary sources, not just the laws themselves.

Other problems include official vs. unofficial laws, slow consolidations, updates to the law (of various kinds) and attempting to normalize the world's laws to a US standard (like excluding municipal laws and avoiding guidance-type documents from civil law countries). These are problems Google doesn't have to deal with and customers expect a very high standard for legal search results.

WorldLII is great in theory but trying running some searches. The results are not nearly as good as just an aggregation of all the national "LII" systems would be (e.g. CanLii)

To get a high school diploma in Ontario, Canada you need to do 40 hours of community service: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/extra/eng/ppm/124a.html.

Here's another product used by major law firms called "Carpe Diem": https://www.tikit.com/products/large-law-firms/time-recordin...

It's usually taxed when its sold, rather than when the increase in value happens. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax

Here's the main T2 form: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pbg/tf/t2/README.html

If you're annoyed about the cost now, wait till you find out about major firms outsourcing work to India and elsewhere for routine tax work.

If you're just starting off you probably don't want to deal with the hassle of dealing with the US and Canadian government. Cross-border tax issues are expensive to deal with and complicated. Many Canadian businesses sell to the US without incorporating there.

Often corporations distribute to shareholders using dividends. There's a dividend tax credit that offsets the corporate tax income (more or less). More broadly, there's a principle in Canadian tax called "integration" where the tax authority tries to make it so that it doesn't matter whether you earn the money through a corporation or personally. More information on integration: http://www.ey.com/ca/en/services/tax/taxmatters-july2013-int...

So, no, generally there's not "double tax". But yes, there is administrative overhead that could exceed the taxes if you're not making much money.

Canadian lawyer and entrepreneur here. The Canadian equivalent is a Federal corporation ($200 filing fee + $20/yr). The government's online step-by-step system does most of the work for you, but doesn't touch the share issuance part. You'll need to do that yourself but there are lots of resources available online for how to issue shares to yourself.

The main cost is hiring an accountant to do the tax return for you. Or figuring out how to do it yourself using software like TaxTron.

If you have employment income + your side project involves a lot of ongoing losses then it may be a good idea to use a partnership or sole proprietorship for tax reasons.

Talk to your lawyer/accountant. There are fewer lawsuits here so you may decide a sole proprietorship (unincorporated business) is fine. Each province has some equivalent of a "Master Business License" that allows you to use a name other than your own for business purposes (so you can cash cheques, etc.).

To conclude (for Canada): generally startups go with a corporation. Side projects might be a corporation, a partnership or a sole proprietorship.

You may want to come check out Toronto before moving here. A great event to see what the City's tech scene is like is HackerNest. It's once a month. You could probably also line up some interviews for your trip.

My wife is a non-Western immigrant (English is her third language). She says she's never faced any discrimination and many people assumes she was born here (in Toronto). Non-white people are very common and very accepted in Toronto.

That depends on where you live. The weather in Toronto is similar to Chicago and New York.

In the first three years of the program only 100 visas were issued: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/start-up-program-disap...

That's a pretty good idea. I've had a few people ask over the years how it's done, and I uploaded the original source code a few years ago. Although I could probably fix up the site faster than I could properly move it over to Github...

insidertrades.org.

I won Yahoo!'s international student programming competition in 2009 with this site. About a year ago it stopped working because of deprecated PHP functions. It had/has quite a few users but I've been too busy to fix it up. It could use a more nurturing home.

This case was actually about whether or not it was legal. It was a mixed decision (seen as being in favour of GlaxoSmithKline) that settled confidentially after the Supreme Court case: http://business.financialpost.com/legal-post/glaxosmithkline...

Here's a well-known Canadian Supreme Court case about transfer pricing that highlights the role of a Swiss subsidiary in a scheme to dramatically reduce taxes on income earned from selling pharmaceuticals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_v_GlaxoSmithKline_Inc

They say later on in that document that you're not paying for tax advice and won't get any: "That said, we’re not providing tax and legal advice. Stripe Atlas users have access to a legal guide prepared by Orrick, a tax guide prepared by PwC, and a free consultation call with an expert from PwC. PwC and Orrick will not provide tailored tax advice unless you engage them to represent you directly as a client.

If you have your own legal counsel or tax advisors, we also recommend speaking to them as you decide whether and how to set up your business with Atlas." https://stripe.com/atlas/faq#taxamplegal

It can be complicated to start a corporation in a country you're a resident of. Starting a corporation in a country you're not a resident of is usually even more complicated because now you have to worry about two tax regimes and the interactions between them. There's also the distinction between corporate taxes and personal taxes and the interactions between those (e.g. your Delaware corporation issues a dividend to the UK founders).

Thanks. I'm the developer.