The federal government recently announced it is killing the “tampon tax,” effective July 1, by removing the GST on products that are “marketed exclusively for feminine-hygiene purposes.” This move, however, did not kill all the taxes on tampons, as a Kafkaesque set of import tariffs remain on these items, which ties up importers in significant amounts of red tape and generates, at most, $4 million in tax revenue for the federal government.

Determining if tampons are subject to tariffs and related products is not a trivial task. In fact, the proper tariff classification for panty-liners was once the subject of a case at the Canadian International Trade Tribunal. The first step for an importer is to obtain the correct tariff code from a 1,577-page Customs Tariff, which is not always simple. Fortunately, in this case, obtaining the code was relatively straightforward, as subheading 9619.00 covers “Sanitary towels (pads) and tampons, napkins and napkin liners for babies and similar articles, of any material.” Within that subheading, there are three tariff items that apply to pads and tampons, two of which have tariff rates above zero:

Importers must pay a 12 per cent tax on goods falling under tariff item 9619.00.92 and a seven per cent tax on goods falling under tariff item 9619.00.99. The importer may be able to use a preferential tariff treatment to reduce the tariff on these items (often to zero), as shown in the far-right column. These tariff treatments include UST (NAFTA United States Tariff), and the GPT (General Preferential Tariff), the latter which received a great deal of attention when dozens of countries were removed from Canada’s GPT list in Budget 2013. Importers must jump through a number of hoops to use a preferential tariff treatment, including obtaining (and retaining for several years) a “certificate of origin” from the exporting company, proving that the item meets the country-of-origin rules for the preferential treatment. These rules are far from simple, running into the hundreds of pages for each individual preferential treatment.