When you buy a bottle of wine in a store or restaurant in BC, your receipt will usually indicate that you paid 10% provincial sales tax and 5% GST on your purchase. Have you really paid 15% tax on your bottle of wine? Absolutely not.
It may surprise you to hear that the real tax rate on imported wine in BC is much, much higher. It varies with the price of the bottle but, for example, if you go into a BC liquor store and buy a bottle of $14 California wine, the real cost of selling that bottle to you is about $6.45 (including LDB operating costs). The remaining $7.55 goes to both levels of goverment with the vast bulk going to the BC government. If you express the part that goes to BC as a percentage of the actual cost of selling the wine, then the \”real\” BC sales tax rate is about 111%.