Canada Post Goes Snoopy and Secretive

So off I go to buy one UK, one NZ and five AUS stamps for my overseas mailings. “They are all the same price. Seven?”

Yes please.

The seven $1.70 stamps are pushed across to me, then the clerk grabs one of my envelopes before I can protest and begins keying in from the return address portion.

What is going on?

Are Canada Post now keeping track of who uses their service to send messages overseas?

Apparently so

I’m old enough to protest, so I ask why the envelope is needed. “To give you the tax exemption”.

It’s like drawing teeth etc. but I finally get an explanation that can be coalesced into “You don’t have to pay the 13% H.S.T. if you are buying more than five stamps AND you have the envelopes with you.

Sounds a bit like the old donut scam when the GST came in. A donut is taxable because it is for consumption, but 6 or more are NOT taxable because they are groceries. Or the other way around.

So who ever heard of this latest exemption? Not my off-site accountant’s secretary – she buys the stamps. Not my canoeing buddy Fred, and HE walks to the post office in his lunchtime to do postage stuff.

Last Friday I bought a roll of stamps. I assume that there are 100, which at 57 cents should have been $57.00. Add 13% and you get $64.41. I’m not sure why I was charged $67.52, since all I got was the debit card receipt.

Moral: next time I buy a roll of stamps, I’m taking a stack of 99 blank envelopes and an addressed envelope and getting nearly $8.00 lopped off the price.

Talk to Me !