Consumers never buy anything from Stripe or Square.

Consumer buy ride services from Uber.

Uber controls the cost of goods/service.

Right, so if you buy a book from Amazon, and then pay your credit card bill a month-something later, that means Amazon and the seller are employees of Visa. Wherever the end-user sends money is the employer; that's it.

When you buy a book from a seller on Amazon, who sets the price?

There are regulations about what people involved in construction have to wear while they're working. It's not the contractee's sole discretion in that case. But if you're an independent building contractor and you want to come to work in sequined coveralls then sure?

A software contractor can indeed work in whatever they want, but the contract may stipulate some things about that and not doing so would be breach of contract. Obviously a contractor is bound to the terms of their contract.

In this case the analogy is the contractor using their own computer and software to manage their work process, not terms of what the work product is.

Likewise, if they're not an employee and their contract doesn't stipulate anything about behaviour on site than I would expect them to follow the law rather than policies they never agreed to... Is everyone entering a workplace subject to HR rules they've never even seen?

For reference, the things that I was vaguely referring to are described in detail here: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tg/rc4110/rc4110-e.html#facto...

That is right. The law in Canada explicitly excludes taxis from the $30k exemption, and taxis must collect gst/hst on all rides, regardless of how much the taxi's sales were in a year. Uber was exploiting this rule by saying their services weren't 'taxis', and each driver was independent, and therefor that rule didn't apply to them. It's a sneaky way to charge most people 5-15% less than their taxi competition.

Source on the CRA not allowing cabbies to be contractors? Because as far as I know they almost universally are. Either to the owner of the cab they drive or to the dispatcher.