This varied from province to province and is only recently true. Quebec only stopped charging PST on the GST on January 1st, 2013 and PEI only stopped when they switched to the HST in April of this year.
The man literally accepted envelopes full of cash from a criminal in clandestine meetings held in hotel rooms. Legitimate business isn’t done that way.
Spoons, that’s all true enough, but it mostly just makes my point. The GST didn’t collect any more money than the MST (at least, not at first). Most people, if you ask them, will be indifferent between paying $100 in taxes on purchases of one set of products vs paying $100 in taxes on purchases of another set of products. Yet when told that the set of products they would pay taxes on would change, the Canadian public threw a collective fit.
There was some opposition from various businesses that had to start collecting taxes when they hadn’t before, but most of the opposition was just opposition from having to pay taxes on purchases that hadn’t been taxed before, in spite of the fact that the total they would pay would be roughly the same as the total they had paid in the past. I maintain that this just demonstrates that the bulk of the opposition was based purely on the visibility of the new tax.
Well, and ignorance.
Spoons seems to be saying the government did a poor job explaining the GST. That is not how I remember it at all; as I recall the government did about as good a job as could be expected (in pre-internet days) of explaining how the GST would work. However, people have trouble understanding stuff like that. You can explain the GST over and over but a lot of folks just won’t get it. I am not sure that it would have been possible to explain it in a way most people would understand it.
To this day, how many people still think the unemployment rate is calculated based on how many people are drawing EI benefits? How many people will still tell you that if you get a raise “into a new tax bracket” you lose money? You aren’t going to be able to explain a revenue-neutral shift in tax policy to a lot of people.
Oh god yes, a lot of people just don’t understand taxes.
I’ve had to bite my tongue to avoid getting into a huge debate when a co-worker brags about reducing his hours to keep his income just below a higher bracket. He thinks he’s saving huge money and other people are suckers for taking his hours :smack:. It’s just not worth the argument.
And the complaints/misinformation I heard when Ontario went over to HST were mind boggling. Some of them from people who should really know better (ie work in our accounting office).