An Adventure
Brigette’s mom came to visit this weekend, and since I had to return my US visa waiver stub (I-94W) by September 28, we decided to go down to Bellingham for the day and do some shopping. The fact that (after this decision had been made) the Canadian Dollar reached parity with the US Dollar, didn’t exactly deter our plans. 
We expected quite a bit of a border lineup — and we got it. We decided to try out going to the duty free store on the Canadian side to see if that would shorten our wait. It probably did, but only by a bit. They had a system in place they called “ferry lineup” where you had to wait your turn like a regular ferry lineup. So, it took about an hour to leave the parking lot of the duty free store. They must have put that system in place to deter people from jumping the line too much.
We did buy quite a few things, though, at the duty free store, because they looked to be good deals: a bottle of vodka for Brigette and me for $27.25US. Brigette’s mom got some cigarettes and baileys. After crossing the border, we had a nice brunch at Denny’s and a good three and a half hour shop at Bellis Fair Mall. We got some really good deals on clothing and books.
Then, at 3:30pm, came the trip back home, with a very short lineup at the border. It took about half an hour to drive from Bellingham right to the custom’s booth (including a stop at the Starbucks drive through to get some coffee). So, really good. We made it before the crowd, which was the plan.
Since we figured it would be quite obvious that we had been shopping, we decided to declare our purchases. We were asked to park and go inside to pay duties and taxes. We weren’t very concerned. That changed very quickly, when we saw how the face of the custom’s officer got very somber. He said taxes on our “duty free” liquor/tobacco purchases would hurt. Since we hadn’t been out of Canada for at least 48 hours, we weren’t eligible for any personal exemptions. We still didn’t think very much of it at that point. We figured it’d be maybe $50 in taxes on a $110 purchase.
Very wrong!
Apparently the provincial government marks up alcohol purchased outside of Canada by at least 100%. Our $30 vodka bottle would have required a $70 duty payment. It somewhat works like this:
- they take the price of alcohol ($30)
- they add provincial a markup of another $30 or so
- then they add GST and PST on the combined amount
And that’s what you have to pay. Absolutely ridiculous. Brigette’s mom was asked to pay $170 in duties and taxes for her $110 purchase.
The Customs official was very nice, though, and totally didn’t want to charge us all that money. He let us go across the street to the duty free store to return our purchases (luckily we had bought everything on the Canadian side).
The duty free guys took our merchandise back without any issues. They’ve obviously had this happen to them before. They even apologized for not pointing out to us that we would have to be out of the country for at least two days to be eligible for the exemption. We had the sneaking suspicion, though, that they were doing it on purpose, because they know people would buy less otherwise and they wouldn’t make as much money.
In the end we didn’t have to pay any duty or tax. We returned our alcohol and tobacco purchases. And the Customs officials didn’t charge us tax on our books or clothes.
It was a good trip, all things considered. And a valuable lesson learned: provincial tobacco and alcohol markups are ridiculously insane. Don’t buy any alcohol unless you’re gone for 48 hours (or more) and if you do, do not go over the exemption limit.
