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Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

Canada doesn't even have free trade internally... It's literally easier to sell to the US or EU than to another province.

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Food and especially liquor continue to have stupid barriers between provinces. But intra-provincial trade increases every year and the CMRA legislation from last year should improve that.

There are no tariffs between Canadian provinces and never have been.

> There are no tariffs between Canadian provinces and never have been.

Did I say there were?

No. You claimed Canada doesn't have free trade internally. The most common barriers to free trade are tariffs. IME tariffs and duties are what most people think of as non-free trade. Witness the current US-Canada trade war. I can order lots of things from all around the world and the main resistance to me doing that are tariffs and duties, wouldn't you agree?

I'm clarifying that the trade barriers on things like liquor and food between Canadian provinces are regulations, not tariffs.

Trade barriers are trade barriers. Free trade means no barriers, not no tariffs specifically. Anything that makes doing business in another province more difficult than regular operation in your own province is a barrier to trade.

Agree completely. The most common barriers to trade are tariffs and I'm glad we don't have those within Canada. The next most common barriers are regulatory and legislative and we've got those but the good news is (unlike the US-Canada trend lately) those barriers are diminishing (at a government pace) in a consistent trend over time.

I'm not aware of steps backwards (as in US-Canada relations) where barriers between provinces increased. Am I wrong to be optimistic?

It'd depend on what you're selling, surely? I've never had any problems of this sort with basic retail product, for example

Well, let's say you sell online, no matter what you're selling, you need to apply the PST/HST of the province the buyer's address is in. And then you need to file a tax return for every province you sell to. Now some provinces have a sales threshold under which you don't need to do a separate tax return, others don't. Some have an HST collected by the Federal government, others don't. And all the PST/HST rates are different. This also applies to digital goods, SaaS, etc...

The US has higher thresholds in every state and no federal sales tax, and buyers pay the duties.

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