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.
Refereed
Yes
