Land of taxes

[Merc]

My wife and I spent two days in Niagra Falls, Ont., Canada doing the usual sight seeing, hiking and biking. We ate a small lunch and the bill in the photo shows the sales taxes we paid added almost $4 to the $23 we were charged for the meal.......and you thought health care in Canada was free.

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[bruce]

Sales tax in Canada is driven by health care about like it is driven by national defense, forest management, etc. JMHO. Sincerely. bruce.

[Roadkingtrax]

Dont rent a car at a major airport in the United States, that has a sports stadium nearby.

[Merc]

It’s relatively safe for the politicians to soak the non-residents who visit their towns and rent cars and stay in hotels and eat in the restaurants. The locals know better.

[Merc]

It just occurred to me that we were the only customers in this restaurant and all the other restaurants that we ate in were nearly empty including two in the Casino. I’ve often said that raising taxes beyond a certain point will yield negative returns.

[Vern Humphrey]

Of course it will. If we assume the business of government is to protect the people and ensure their prosperity, taxes work against the latter goal.

[JOHN COOK]

It’s relatively safe for the politicians to soak the non-residents who visit their towns and rent cars and stay in hotels and eat in the restaurants. The locals know better.

Wife and I visited Niagara Falls several years ago and got into conversation with a security guard at the Casino and we were discussing gas prices. He was a Canadian
citizen and he said he never purchased gas in Canada, always crossed over to US side and purchased. I didn't realize price I saw were liters instead of gallons. Prices were rather high in restaurants (I thought) at that time. One time visit to see the Falls never again...

john

[Sunray]

Sales tax in Canada is primarily driven by the wages civil servants get paid. Health care costs what it does because all the unskilled workies in hospitals, etc. get paid skilled wages. They pay people to do nothing but push people around in wheelchairs. Cops here start at about $83 grand. Goes to a bit under $100 grand in 4 years. A police Sgt. gets $125 grand. And if you get caught committing a crime, you'll usually get suspended with pay. There's a guy in Waterloo(NE of TO) who's been on paid vacation for 2 or 3 years.
HST is the "Harmonized Sale Tax". Federal and Provincial taxes collected and wasted by both.
And our total tax bill is about 42% of our total income.
"...price I saw were litres..." Been that way since Junior's(our current PM) daddy got PO'd with Nixon in 1970 and jammed the metric system down our throats to punish him.

[barretcreek]

Junior's(our current PM) daddy got PO'd with Nixon

Fidel was your PM then?

[Merc]

Our last July vacation in Lakefield, Ont. near Peterborough was 20 years ago in 1998. I retired and shifted the vacation south to Florida in February. I always admired the Lakefield area and the fishing was always great. We made sure to fill our gas tanks at the last rest stop on I-90 at Angola, NY before crossing the border to avoid buying gas in Canada. It was a shock to see how expensive it was to fill an empty tank with Canadian gas, even back in 1998. Canadians are plentiful in Florida in February.

[gwp]

Consider the Canadian Dollar is worth .76 in US currency.

[Merc]

That’s correct although I’ve been there enough times to remember when both were equal or the US dollar was on the minus side.

[Mark in Ottawa]

The Harmonized sales tax (HST)is a blend of the federal and provincial sales taxes and totals 13%. The HST is similar to the European Value Added Tax (VAT) and is added on the the basic price of goods and services. One important characteristic of the HST is that it is visible to the consumer; it replaced a tax that was added on earlier in the production chain and was hidden. As was suggested, our health care is not "free", it is paid from tax revenues and according to a study by the Fraser Institute a couple of years ago, came to about $11,000 per year for a typical family of four. This money has to come from somewhere and our higher tax rate is where it comes from. You can't just cherry pick good and bad things and say that we pay more for our restaurants and gas, you have to look at the total picture and in totality I don't think that we pay that much more tax than in the USA, particularly of you factor in American health care costs.

As far as the problem being the cost of the civil service, I would certainly dispute that at most levels. Certainly at the lowest levels, civil servants tend to earn more than in the private sector but in the middle and upper levels the pay is far below the private sector. As an example, a friend of mine who was the franchise owner of a good sized pharmacy was earning about 50% more than a typical deputy minister who was managing a government department with budgets in the multi-billion dollar range. (Disclosure: I was a Canadian federal Public Servant for 42 years)

[Sandpebble]

on the other hand.... they'd all comit suicide in Canada before paying our medical insurance premiums... or the extra costs we pay for services or products that provide their employees insurance ...

one way or another... we all pay it

[remus]

Americans pay a lot of taxes to support foreign lands that aren't worth a hoot. If we gave less away they wouldn't have to tax us so much. I really do resent part of my taxes going to useless foreigners.