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The weird thing is that there are goods and services in Canada that are honestly priced. Buy gas, you pay the price displayed at the pump. The same with liquor; you pay the price posted on the shelf. The ticket you buy at the neighbourhood cinema includes tax – although that’s even weirder: the ticket price is honest, but the prices at the food concession are not. You pay HST on both the movie and the popcorn, but only one is “plus tax” at the register.

No big deal – we just mentally add the 13 per cent, right? Well, sometimes. There are goods and services for which you don’t have to pay the GST/HST, because they are exempt or zero-rated. They include agricultural products, prescription drugs and some medical devices, most health and child care services, financial services and services offered by charities, and most – but not all – groceries. But here’s a concept: instead of calculating – or not – an added tax, how about displaying the real price from the get-go?

Our dishonesty in pricing doesn’t go unnoticed in the rest of the world, and may affect tourism. In a well-researched paper on tax-included pricing, Canadian author and tax lawyer David M. Sherman quotes an Australian economics expert: “I have never met anyone from outside North America who has not complained that the worst part of a trip to North America is discovering that the price isn’t the price.”

So why haven’t we stopped acting like little kids who hide their eyes when they don’t want to see something bad? Some people suggest we can’t display honest pricing because of direct and indirect taxation issues, and different provincial tax regimes and harmonization regulations within Canada – as if more than 100 other countries haven’t overcome many of those same problems. In fact, many countries have “honesty in pricing” legislation which mandates that taxes are included in advertised pricing.