Milk In Bags

Oh, no! Ontarian's drink milk from plastic bags! This dirty little secret was exposed when this video was posted on YouTube. I've lived in Ontario long enough that I take bagged milk for granted, but for most of world it is a very strange way to buy milk. This Toronto Star article mentions a few places that switching to bagged milk, including South Africa where I was born. Perhaps bagged milk is the future and us folk in Eastern Canada are just ahead of the curve. Or maybe we are just weird. ^^

Harmonised Sale Tax

The Ontario budget was released today and it begins the process of blending the Provincial Sales Tax (PST) with the federal Goods and Services Tax (GST). The Harmonised Sales Tax (HST) would be 13%, the sum of the PST and GST. This HST thing not new. Three other provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador) belnded their sales tax a long time ago.

Since the PST only applied to the sale of goods, never to services, and some goods were exempt from GST, the new HST means that people will be paying more for almost everything. Yes, this HST is going to be so popular among Ontario voters. :-7

It won't affect retail businesses much since they already collect both PST and GST, and in fact, their paper work will probably get easier. As a service business, I only had to collect GST and the paper work for that is straight forward, so I hope the HST doesn't make it worse. Yeah, right, I'm hoping. The HST goes into effect July 1, 2010.

Completely unrelated to the HST, the budget also introduces a 100% write off for computer purchases. I'll have to dig into this some more to see what is really covered.