cover image: The GST/HST : Goods and Services Tax/Harmonized Sales Tax : creating an integrated sales tax in a federal country

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The GST/HST : Goods and Services Tax/Harmonized Sales Tax : creating an integrated sales tax in a federal country

11 Apr 2012

Since the most distinct feature of the VAT in Canada is clearly the extent to which it has become a provincial as well as federal tax, Section 3 then discusses the (almost) parallel evolution of the Quebec Sales Tax (QST) as well as the development and expansion over time of the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) in a number of other provinces. [...] Similarly, the combined federal and provincial version of the GST, the HST (the adoption of which seems to have hit many citizens in British Columbia out of the blue in 2010), was the culmination of two trends — increasing recognition of the inefficiency of the 50-year-old provincial retail sales tax (RST) and growing awareness of the benefits that federal and provincial governments, as well as ci [...] Indeed, in its early years the GST was the most heartily disliked tax in Canada.8 One result of all the initial opposition was that from the beginning the GST has had certain characteristics that are not particularly desirable from a technical perspective.9 Another result was the rather peculiar arrangement made with the province of Quebec to have the provincial tax administration administer the f [...] Even the new government that came to power after the 1993 election, although it had explicitly campaigned on a platform of eliminating the GST, in the end did little more than to change the name of the tax to the present GST/HST. [...] Since on the whole, there was no net increase in sales taxes when the GST was introduced and the new tax, unlike the tax it replaced, resulted in little cascading, there probably was not much impact on the net redistributive outcome of the fiscal system as a result of the GST-MST substitution in the first place.52 In any case, to the extent regressivity was considered a problem, the logical approa
government politics public finance economy taxation fiscal policy economic policy government policy payments prices sales tax vat government budget taxpayers value-added tax provincial excise tax business finance province goods and services tax (canada) equalization harmonized sales tax intergovernmental tax relations federal-provincial tax relations equalization payments government finances hst gst canada revenue agency goods and services tax (australia) input tax credits

Authors

Bird, Richard M

Pages
39
Published in
Canada

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