Just to clarify, there's no 13% sales tax - that'll be 5% federal and X% provincial (which ranges from 0-10%).
But largely in practice you're correct as even the combined HST varies (13% in Ontario, 15% in the four Atlantic coast provinces).
Clearly corporate taxes are charged for a reason and presumably the additional revenue would be of benefit. However it seems to me that in our outrage we lose sight of the fact that the money doesn't disappear. If a company retains a greater portion of its revenue it has to do something with it. And as you say whether they payout dividends, hire more staff, expand their operations the at least some portion of the money comes back into the system. I guess the main difference is that the government doesn't get to decide how it is spent...
Apple is a fairly decent point to the contrary; they were able to let money sit around doing absolutely nothing at all because they didn't want to touch it until they didn't face stiff repatriation taxes for doing so.
Generally speaking, though, I agree with your later points. The first one- corporate taxes are charged for a reason- I'm less convinced that the reason is a good one. It mostly seems like a feel-good way to bury the tax so people don't realize that they're ultimately paying for it.
As an aside, it's rich that it's always Americans complaining about companies paying low American taxes on billions that they make overseas. Netflix is more international than American now (2/3rds of their subscribers are not Americans), yet they are especially adept at avoiding taxes everywhere else. In the UK they have repeatedly paid $0 because they claim to be a Netherlands operation there, etc. In Canada every single competitor has to charge a sales tax of 13% (and consumers weigh the total cost, so if applied it would put downward pressure on Netflix's prices), but Netflix charges none.
In any case, corporate tax rates are often much ado about nothing because in the end that money ends up in various other tax brackets. It becomes a capital gain, or a dividend, or some other form that often gets taxed at the personal level.