rbt
Senior Member
Unfortunately, the city doesn't have the power to impose sales taxes.
Oddly, with the introduction of HST, neither does the province from a practical perspective.
Federal government policy under Harper, and likely still today, is a single rate for the province. Evidently non-trivial software changes are required for them to manage it by anything other than the province field of the mailing address.
For the province to do it, they would need to stand-up their own collection and enforcement system which would wipe out about half of a 0.5% sales tax.
The province could implement a 0.5% province wide infrastructure HST bump which gets distributed to the municipality it's collected within but that's a tough sell politically outside the GTA and Ottawa.
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