I'm really happy with how the Canadian Revenue Agency handles things. You file online, there's plenty of free services to do your taxes. They support auto-fill where the CRA can send them the tax info it already knows about you (e.g. from banks and employers), etc. I filed my a few weeks ago and they assessed my returns by the next afternoon. Last week I received a cheque in the mail, but that's only because I forgot to fill out the direct deposit info on the CRA website. The husband of a former colleague used to fill out junk on their tax returns because they knew that the CRA would just fix it all up, and then tell them what they owed (or what they would be refundend) in their notice of assessment.
Technically the situation in Canada is the same as in the US. You must use a third party to file your taxes online. There is a donationware system from simpletax.ca and most (all?) of the others will not charge for a sufficiently low yearly income.
That doesn't change the fact that in Canada there is no way for a citizen to file their taxes directly with the government other than by using the paper forms and mailing them in. There used to be a telephone system but that was eliminated some years back.
The relationship between the private tax preparers and the CRA is much closer than is healthy. I suspect that is related to the current situation.
This bothers me enough that I file my taxes on paper as a form of protest. The nice thing is that you can put pretty much any nonsense on there you want. They will just ignore your figures if they disagree which of course shows how silly the current situation is.
