SALES TAXES IN CANADA: THE GST-HST-QST-RST “SYSTEM”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadians developed and implemented a sales tax system that no one in their right mind would have designed from scratch. Nonetheless, more by accident than design, Canada ended up being a bold innovator in sales tax policy and administration in several important respects. For decades, academics had argued almost unanimously that one could not impose a standard invoice-credit destination-based value added tax (VAT) at the subnational level of government. 2 Canada's almost two decades of experience demonstrates conclusively that this view is incorrect: not only can it be done, but it has been done, and done well. Moreover, Canadian experience also demonstrates that a federal VAT can work perfectly well in a country in which some subnational units have their own VATs, some have their own retail sales taxes (RSTs), and some have no sales tax at all. The facts are thus on the ground and visible: the Canadian system not only works but works fairly well-- at least in Canada. A similar system could in principle work equally well in the United States. Indeed, the US could not only learn from Canadian experience but it could also do better in a number of ways if it wished to do so. Basketball and telephones were also invented by Canadians, but both were adopted, adapted and in many ways improved by Americans. 3 We see no reason why two-level sales taxation should be any different. Canadian experience shows that the existence or non-existence of subnational retail sales taxes is, in both technical and economic terms, a matter of indifference when considering a federal VAT. On the other hand, the existence of a federal VAT may be extremely important from the perspective of subnational governments that wish to improve their sales taxes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".