[LargeFormat] Buying and selling on ebay

Tim Atherton largeformat@f32.net
Tue Jul 23 10:56:34 2002


> customs form: "Photographic gear manufactured in USA."  He said that

That's true Marco - no duty on import to Canada (just our ubiquitous
national sales tax)

(in fact there are lots of goods from the US with no import duty on them)

And I can't remember if it's "professional photographic equipment" or "Large
Format professional photographic equipment" that gets the same deal (as you
may know, Customs tariffs are incredibly complex...).

But generally either of those descriptions leads to no import duty.

BTW - I was told by a U.S. LF camera maker who used to ship to Karsh that
this exemption was the result of Karsh lobbying then Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau during a sitting... nice story even if it's only apocryphal.

An added plus is getting things shipped via USPS/Canada Post. The Canada
customs/Canada post partnership seems amazingly random. It's a lottery
whether you get charged duty/sales tax or not. A $700 lens got charged
absolutely nothing (should have been about $50 GST), while a book from
Amazon got  hooked for 2.75 GST + 5.00 service fee...  (but UPS/fedex will
get slammed every time) I'd say about 35-40% of the time Canada
Customs/Canada Post just don't seem to bother...

tim