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There are no duties on importing US agricultural equipment parts into Canada, HST is max 15% so $1.50 extra. At $10 it would fit under the de minimis tax/duty value which is CAD$20, so he wouldn't even have to pay tax on it and no broker is necessary.
What did him in was the shipping cost plus UPS and a few other carriers charging totally unnecessary $20+ brokerage fees for low value shipments.
He is allowed to do the custom clearance himself instead of using the shipper's broker. He just needs to get the paperwork and take them physically into his local CBSA office, then get the CBSA paperwork back to the shipping company.
He could also have the item sent to a mailbox in the US and then pick it up from there.
Of course, the person has a business to run, so it probably would make more sense to just pay the broker ($20 + percentage of the Tax for fronting the money) to do rather than to spend an hour on handling paperwork and lining up at the office on one item or drive to the US and back.
In theory he should have been under the exemption, can't speak to that. But $20 is extremely low.
Canada does nothing to promote home-grown economic prosperity. What is the value in adding those taxes and fees on a $10 part? Do we honestly believe that type of protectionism is going to create a bunch of jobs domestically?
Our GDP has grown mostly due to real estate. I work in tech and run a software-based business that does very well. But every time I look to secure new clients, I always look south. I haven’t been employed by Canadians in over 10 years.
When I had a small software consultancy in Toronto (10 years back), we also primarily looked for US clients.
We had a running joke in the office that went something like..
Canadian client: here are my vague business requirements, tell me exactly what this will cost before we start.
US client: here's exactly how much money I have, let's work together to figure out how I can make the most of it.
There's such a conservative and risk-averse mentality in Canadian business, and it leads to a lack of trust and innovation.
A business in my family was ineligible for COVID aid for the longest time because the business was too new to be paying people salaries. For some reason they decided the government drew an arbitrary line and said that businesses must have employees on salary to matter.
I can understand wanting to limit elegibility to legitimate endeavours, but it's not like the business was some kind of side-hustle being run out of the trunk of somebody's car.
It's somewhat ironic saying this in response to someone who because of the high price (he thought) he was going to have to pay he took his business to someone local.
He had $60. His options were: A) pay someone local to make it B) buy from abroad and save $50 to spend on other items to increase economic prosperity
Either way he gets his part. But without the inflated costs, he could have had more “stuff” and created other jobs.
We don’t employ switchboard operators anymore and our lives are definitely better. To me, protectionism would be like keeping operators employed even in the face of modern switch technology.
Would you care to elaborate on how this is a mind virus, or responsible for the fees in the post?
I will always enjoy the irony of attaching "mind virus" to concepts with seemingly zero understanding or consideration. What could possibly be a better demonstration of a "mind virus?"
It’s harder to do, but I’d rather get to the future with everyone in tow, not just those that think or agree with me.
Unfortunately, the same people who are in position to change things for the better (ie. to make a country more competitive, innovative) stands to benefit from more bureaucracy, not less.
for example US government forms require UX testing (user research), but even the smallest change requires it, and all forms require it. but you can't just use a big pool of preapproved providers or whatever, it goes through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ... which now is in effect a fucking big roadblock of a bottleneck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperwork_Reduction_Act
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
Also, I've never seen a comment fall off the rails halfway through as hard as this one did.
Argentina is a special case of decades of absurd mismanagement. Milei's prescription is different, but that doesn't mean it's good. It may end up killing the patient altogether.
of course the extremely dramatic complete eradication of any kind of redistribution is almost surely not the optimal path to growth
Hyperinflation? Some revolutionary changes are best left untried.
The correct approach ofc would be to manage money supply responsibly but Argentina has failed to do that over and over.
Alternatively employers could give all of the necessities of life in raw form (housing, medical treatment, food, water, internet, clothing, etc) but that doesn't scale well and is vastly more inefficient than just providing the currency required to procure those goods individually. Not to mention the leverage that gives employers into how you live your personal life which is a huge concern too.
It's hard for me to see a return to barter as anything other than a collapse in the economic complexity of a country.