Canada: 'illegal fee' - carbon tax: eco fee scam - tax...tax...tax...

Source: torontosun.com

Eco fee sham
Experts say the eco fees charged for recycling are 'illegal'

By ANTONELLA ARTUSO, QUEEN'S PARK BUREAU CHIEF

The new Ontario “eco fees” charged to consumers on thousands of products are illegal, consumer and legal experts say.

“It’s an illegal fee,” Mel Fruitman, vice president of the Consumers’ Association of Canada, told the Toronto Sun. “It’s an add-on fee and there is nobody in this country who is allowed to put on a tax except governments. As far as I can tell, unless they slipped through something quietly in the middle of the night when everybody else was asleep including me, they have no authority to do this.”

Cyndee Todgham Cherniak, a sales tax counsel affiliated with Lang Michener LLP, said the fees are not permissible under the provincial government’s own Waste Diversion Act or the Constitution of Canada.

“This smells like a tax, looks like a tax, how is this different from a sales tax?” Todgham Cherniak said. “What you’ve got is the tax being passed on from someone to the consumer which means it’s an indirect tax, and under the Constitution Act... the province can only impose direct taxes, they can’t impose indirect taxes.”

Both Fruitman and Todgham Cherniak pointed to the tire tax, where the consumer pays a fee at the disposal site, as a legally acceptable way to recoup the cost of recycling a product.

Instead, under the program set up by Stewardship Ontario, a fee is charged to the “brand owner” or importer of a designated product and then passed onto the consumer either in the sticker price or as an eco fee added at the cash register.

Public complaints are already coming in that retailers are charging consumers more than the original fee set by Stewardship Ontario, which is illegal, according to Environment Minister John Gerretsen.

Amanda Harper Sevonty, a spokesperson for Stewardship Ontario, said it is up to the manufacturers and retailers to determine if and how their fees are passed onto customers.

“We strongly encourage our stewards if they are going to pass the fee onto retailers, and retailers onto consumers, that the fee that they pass on reflects the fee that they are charged,” she said. “But we have no way of monitoring, and quite honestly, we cannot step in and tell them what to set the fees at because it violates the Competition Act. So one retailer may decide to charge something, another retailer may decide not to charge anything. We have no authority over that whatsoever.”