The guy is raving, if he had imported it, he was going to get ripped off by private corporations not by the government.
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.
Thanks for this comment. Duty? Customs? On a 10 dollar part? Especially for agricultural purposes - this guy is a little off his rocker. It seems like he tried to buy a part, found out shipping was expensive and the seller wanted to use a broker (probably $20), neither of which have anything to do with regulations.
There are options to paying the custom broker, but none of them are really great.
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.
There's no good option to import something, you pay through the nose where brokerage fees greatly exceed the value of taxes collected on most items. The fees are deductible, but it's still an expense.
In theory he should have been under the exemption, can't speak to that. But $20 is extremely low.
I don’t think the “woke-mind-virus” superlative is conducive to the type of conversation we should be having but otherwise I fully agree.
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.
One thing is definitely clear: Canada's federal government is sorely lacking in people who understand small business.
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.
> Do we honestly believe that type of protectionism is going to create a bunch of jobs domestically
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.
It is, except that’s the short-sighted fallacy of this too.
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.
I disagree, I think those types of things need to be said and in more places than they currently are. It’s the only way to build momentum to achieve change. Sure, it might be uncomfortable but that’s a part of growth.
"Woke" was originally shorthand for "woke up to the fact that socioeconomics is not a level playing field", usually w.r.t. race but intersecting with gender and class.
Would you care to elaborate on how this is a mind virus, or responsible for the fees in the post?
Can't imagine you'll get a reply. The term, as with virtually all modern political terminology, quickly lost all meaning and just became a synonym for anything vaguely progressive.
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?"
To me, it’s like making a clear, well-supported, and coherent argument, but nonchalantly adding curse words. It adds nothing, except alienating those who might otherwise have listened.
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.
A lot of countries trend toward bureaucracy as their biggest “innovation”.
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.
there are good bureaucratic innovations (standardized forms, applying service design to forms, digitalization, self service portals, browser based, etc) and then there's the usual problem when good intentions get translated into process, and it fucks up everything.
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.
I don't have a position on whether it's a good thing or not, but it seems like the anecdote about importing a part might be the desired path for the government: Make it a huge pain to import parts so that people prefer sourcing them domestically.
Also, I've never seen a comment fall off the rails halfway through as hard as this one did.
some valid points at the start, but as soon as the "woke mind virus" is mentioned we know we are dealing with a moron who can't see the forest for the trees - a classic example of Godwin's Second Law
Economists like to say that there are only four types of economies: developing economies, developed economies, Argentina, and Japan.
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.
dollarization makes sense, the rest is just claptrap talk about cutting social services (and some of which would be a necessary conclusion anyway, because currently the spending is financed by simply money printing)
of course the extremely dramatic complete eradication of any kind of redistribution is almost surely not the optimal path to growth
Milei is already trying to allow employers to pay employees in meat and milk instead of currency. Anyone who is looking towards Argentina as an exciting example of what Libertarianism can do in a crisis, get ready to be deeply disappointed. I agree that (western) government has a severe problem in how it can't keep regulations streamlined, up to date, and able to be realistically met, but looking to the situation in Argentina as anything other than a disaster is telling about the view point of the author.
It sounds like a nice alternative to engaging with a broken currency but it creates all these headaches/problems. How do we stop employers from leveraging the quality and quantity of these goods in such a way that employees are still provided and equivalent benefit as before? Even with refrigeration, food spoils, so if you give your employee their salary in perishables that institutes an effective top salary, set to the cost in USD to acquire (2k calories * number of days in the pay period * number of dependents). Everything after that is extra that you can't consume and will go bad. And if you try to trade the extra to get some hard currency, well everyone else in your boat will be doing the same, which will lead to increased inflation for these raw goods.
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.
