Evaluating Canada's Tax Policy on the Second-Hand Market

Abstract

The growth of the second-hand marketplace over the last decade has shaped the way individuals buy and sell personal-use property in Canada. With the establishment of internet services such as Kijiji, individuals are able to advertise their used, second-hand personal-use property to a mass audience and sell to a specific buyer quickly and easily. These noncommercial transactions are commonplace in Canada and therefore each jurisdiction administering a sales tax maintains some form of guidance for these transactions as well as when and how sales tax is collected. Governments in Canada implement and maintain tax policies for transactions in the second-hand economy despite limited discussion in the academic literature. Therefore, it is worthwhile to investigate what guidance the academic literature provides, and compare these understandings to what is currently practiced in Canada’s sales tax jurisdictions. Through this comparison of the literature with a jurisdictional scan of policies throughout Canada, this paper will investigate how adequately aligned Canadian sales taxes are with the recommendations provided in the literature.