Canadian GST HST PST TPS/TVQ/QST Sales Tax Calculator

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©1996-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

• GST sometimes knows as the GST (Gouge and Screw Tax). In Québec, the GST is called the TPS (Taxe sure let Produits en Services) literally: tax on products and services.
• HST
• PST In Québec, PST is called TVQ (Taxe de Vente du Québec) literally: tax of selling of Québec or QST (Québec Sales Tax)

The calculator is also available with Java source to download and run off-net. It is designed to be cannibalised, so that you can use whatever parts of the calculator source code you want in your own code, e.g. a shopping cart. There are notes in the source on precisely how the taxes are calculated. You can also configure your copy of the downloaded program to start up with whatever province you like.

This Applet computes either GST + PST or HST. The rules about which goods need to pay GST/PST/HST are complex and vary from province to province. Unfortunately, this Applet won’t help you sort that out. It just computes the tax if it is payable. Book vendors will be familiar with the rules for books, for example, or you can check with the provincial taxation agencies listed at the bottom of the page.

Out of province vendors must now collect the same tax as vendors in the buyer’s home province.

Fine Points

• When the vendor lives in province A and the buyer lives in province B, what do you do? To be safe, you must consult the laws of province B. In general if you, as vendor, have a business presence in province B, you must collect the tax for province B and remit it to province B. If you don’t have a presence, it is the responsibility of the buyer to submit the tax to province B, but in practice very few people conform with the law.
• When the vendor lives in province A, and the buyer’s ship-to address in is province B, and the buyer’s bill-to address is in province C, what do you do? You would have to consult the websites for provinces B and C. Unless you read otherwise, calculate the tax by rules of province C and remit to province C.

If, CanadianTax, the above Canadian Sales Tax Calculator signed Java Applet (that can also be run as an application) does not work…

1. Often problems can be fixed simply by clicking the reload button on your browser.
2. Make sure you have both JavaScript and Java enabled in your browser.
3. This signed Java Applet (that can also be run as an application) needs 32-bit (not 64-bit) Java 1.5 or later. For best results use the latest 1.7.0_02. If you have both 32 and 64-bit JVMs installed, in the Java Control Panel, configure your 32-bit java.exe as the user JVM and your 64-bit java.exe as the system JVM. You also need a recent browser.
4. It works under any operating system that supports Java e.g. W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64/Linux/OSX
5. You should see the Applet hybrid above looking much like this screenshot. If you don’t, the following hints should help you get it working:
6. For this Applet hybrid to work, you must click grant/accept to give it permission to let you copy/paste. If you refuse to grant permission, the program may crash with an inscrutable stack dump on the console complaining about AccessController.checkPermission.
7. Optionally, you may permanently install the Canadian Mind Products code-signing certificate so you don’t have to grant each time.
8. If the above Applet hybrid appears to freeze-up, click Alt-Esc repeatedly to check for any buried permission dialog box.
9. If you have certificate troubles, check the installed certificates and remove or update any obsolete or suspected defective certificates. The only certificate used by this program is mindprodcert2012dsa.cer.
10. Especially if this Applet hybrid has worked before, try clearing the browser cache and rebooting.
11. To ensure your Java is up to date, check with Wassup. First, download it and run it as an application independent of your browser, then run it online as an Applet to add the complication of your browser.
12. If the above Applet hybrid does not work, check the Java console for error messages.
13. If the above Applet hybrid does not work, you might have better luck with the downloadable version available below.
14. If you are using Mac OS X and would like an improved Look and Feel, download the QuaQua look & feel from randelshofer.ch/quaqua. UnZip the contained quaqua.jar and install it in ~/Library/Java/Extensions or one of the other ext dirs.
15. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, 8 or 9, try another browser. Seriously. Microsoft has taken great pains, over and over, to screw up Java and every other multi-platform standardisation.
16. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, 8 or 9, you must click to allow blocked content permission for Active X to run. This also gives permission to Java to run. Click the Information bar, and then click Allow blocked content. Unfortunately, this also allows dangerous ActiveX code to run. However, you must do this in order to get access to perfectly-safe Java Applets running in a sandbox. This is part of Microsoft’s war on Java. Don’t put up with it! Use a different browser.
17. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, makes sure the Java Plug-In SSV helper add-in is installed and enabled. If it is not, try reinstalling the Java JRE.
18. If you have Windows 7 64-bit and Internet Explorer 64-bit, in theory you can use 64-bit Java, but I never been able to get it to work.
19. Try upgrading to a more recent version of your browser, or try a different browser e.g. Firefox, SeaMoney, Safari or Avant.
20. If you still can’t get the program working click HELP for more detail.
21. If you can’t get the above Applet hybrid working after trying the advice above and from the HELP button below, have bugs to report or ideas to improve the program or its documentation, please send me an email at.

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History Of Canadian Sales Tax

Canadian Tax Calculator now has a Time Travel feature, where you can input a date, and have the taxes calculated using the rates the way they were or will be on that date. To do this, I need an accurate history of what sales taxes have been since 1991. Much of the material on the Internet in contradictory or incomplete. Please let me know of any errors or omissions in the following table of changes to Canadian sales taxes (GST, HST and PST/TVQ/QST) since 1991.

HST

• It is easier for a consumer to compute the final cost in his head.
• A business has to compute and remit only one tax instead of two.
• A business has to track the picayune rules for only one tax instead of two.
• Taxpayers support one bureaucracy instead of two.
• The GST is well designed to fairly tax businesses like the custom computer manufacturing business I used to run. We would pay GST on the all the materials we purchased, just the way ordinary consumers do and we collected GST on all the computers we sold. We would remit the difference. The interlocking records of all the businesses discourages fraud. With HST, the PST is handled this same way.

• The effective rate was increased as part of the switchover.
• The exceptions changed in a way that hurt that particular taxpayer.
• A particularly corrupt political party introduced the HST.

Notes

BC is proposing something really stupid — making the sales tax different for businesses and individuals. This means a bookkeeping nightmare if you buy something for your business with your own money and then get reimbursed. Liberals claim to be the party of business but these donkeys have no clue about avoiding pointless paperwork.

The Liberal government is offering a bogus choice between HST and GST + PST in the referendum by promising to lower the tax to 10% for HST and leave it as is 12% for GST + PST. I am pretty sure once the referendum is over they will jack the HST back up or never take it down. Though I favour HST, I think this is a downright crooked way to rig the referendum.

To help the medicine go down, governments across Canada sometimes offer a cash back scheme billed as a GST/HST rebate. It actually has nothing to do with the tax since you need not provide any receipts for purchases or taxes paid. Its main function is to encourage people to file income tax promptly since you don’t get the cheque unless you have filed.

Both the USA and Canada have the idiotic rule that the vendor must remit tax to the buyer’s province. It would have made much more sense for the vendor to collect the tax based on his own province and to remit the tax to his province. After all that is the province that provided the services to create the good or service. It would have made sales tax an order of magnitude simpler for businesses. The vendor would not need to know anything about the buyer’s location, would have a single tax rate to consider, and a single place to remit taxes collected. Any difference in the total amounts calculated could have been corrected by a handful of cheques exchanged between the provinces.

Package	Version	Released	Licence	Language	Notes
Canadian Sales Tax Calculator	4.2	2012-01-13	free	Java	❘ precis ❘ screenshot ❘ browse source repository for the current version of Canadian Sales Tax Calculator. Applet to calculate Canadian Sales tax, GST, HST and PST today or for dates in the past 1,630K zip for Canadian Sales Tax Calculator Java source, compiled class files, jar and documentation to run on your own machine either as an application or an Applet. First install the most recent Java. To install, extract the zip download with WinZip, (or similar unzip utility) into any directory you please, often J:\ — ticking off the use folder names option. To check out the corresponding source from the Subversion repository, use the TortoiseSVN repo-browser to access canadiantax source in repository with [Tortoise] Subversion client on wush.net/svn/mindprod/com/mindprod/canadiantax/. After you have installed the jar, you can run it as an application. Type: java -jar J:\com\mindprod\canadiantax\canadiantax.jar adjusting as necessary to account for where the jar file is. download ASP PAD XML program description for the current version of Canadian Sales Tax Calculator. 39.2MB JET installer exe for Canadian Sales Tax Calculator Windows only hybrid Applet run as a 32-bit JET-compiled *.exe application without using a browser. Does not include source or documentation. Canadian Sales Tax Calculator is free. $489.00 US donated so far. If the CMP utilities solved your problem, please donate a buck or two, or donate to one of the charities featured in the footer public service ads throughout the website and get a tax receipt. Full source included. You may even include the source code, modified or unmodified in free/commercial open source/proprietary programs that you write and distribute. Non-military use only.

	You can get the freshest copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/mindprod.com website mirror)
	http://mindprod.com/applet/canadiantax.html	J:\mindprod\applet\canadiantax.html
	Please email your feedback for publication, letters to the editor, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to Roedy Green : If you want your message kept confidential, not considered for posting, please explicitly specify that.
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