Well, I’m nothing if not a woman of diverse talents….
Colby Cosh is lamenting the arrival of a book he is to review, and the accompanying GST and postal handling fee.

Good news: the postman finally arrived with the latest book I’m supposed to review for The American Spectator! The bad news: he held out his hand for $7.51 when he handed it over. Huh? Surely they don’t send packages postage-due anymore… No, the $7.51 was a smidgen of GST, plus, naturally, a $5 “handling fee”, because it requires rather a lot of work for Customs to do the math of figuring out 7% of the price of a book.
But I haven’t bought this book, I told the postman: it’s been sent to me free so I can review it. How can you charge me GST on an article when no sale has taken place?

From the firm of McMillan, McMillan and McMillan, I can offer readers this bit of advice: I think Mr. Cosh is screwed in this instance, unless he plans to alter the book and return it – a few strokes of yellow highlighter, perhaps ?
Under the EOPS Program (Exporter of Processing Services) goods imprted for repair or alteration:
Customs memorandum D8-I-I Temporary importation of goods into Canada.
Special tariff item 9993.00.00 – duty free
GST – special authority # 16-08921663
No postal handling fee is applicable.
Well, sometimes that works. Often, despite chapter and verse loudly displayed on the box, the bike helmets I recieve for custom painting still have an invoice attached. This is no small irritation – to get a helmet insured for several hundred bucks released by the post office, I have to pay their 7% ransom. That’s a pretty good chunk of my profit, you know? But if I send it back, I have a cranky customer and no profit at all.
But at least I can claim a 100% refund of the fees upon shipping it back to the owner. (The application form for the refund is on the Customs invoice itself). I always include a snarky letter though, informing them of the meaning of the word “exempt” and suggesting they check into an employee literacy program.
That also applies to the GST invoices you recieve from customs brokers (UPS is a master at this) after the fact. Don’t pay those fees if your package has been properly marked – tell them to shove it. Send them the memorandum info and inpugn their professional credentials. They have no right to collect, don’t have to remit, and it’s not up to you to solve their self inflicted accounting problems.

Donald Sensing just saved me a lot of typing.

All of which is to say that the accidental characteristics of marriage – love, affection, property and other rights – spring from what marriage is rather than define what marriage is. Therefore, whatever relationship homosexuals may have with one another, and whatever legal rights civil authority may confer upon them, marriage is inherently – indeed, metaphysically – the province only of men and women united in matrimony.

Agreed. I have not found an argument to support the extension of legal marriage to include same-sex couples that I could not use in equal measure to demand the right to marry my sister.
Being of the same gender, society’s interest in the health of potential offspring is nullified – though it can also be argued that removing the ability to procreate as a defining property of marriage opens the door pretty wide. I don’t know how you can arbitrarily set aside something as fundamental as procreation to broaden the definition of marriage to include homosexual relationships, but stick it back in to narrow that same definition to exclude incestuous ones.
If it is discriminatory to deny persons the right to legally marry on the basis of same-sex orientation (be it choice or chance), is it not equally discriminatory to deny persons the right to marry on the basis of sexual ambivilance? Being homosexual or heterosexual is not a product of having sex with a person of the same or opposite gender, or having sex at all! Celibacy, whether voluntary or involuntary, does not affect orientation.
(Indeed, the entire discussion of sexual orientation is a red herring. This issue rests on gender, not orientation. Same-sex orientation has never been used to deny a man or woman the right to marry a person of the opposite sex.)
This is not a frivolous suggestion. It’s not uncommon for siblings to live their entire adult lives together, to share incomes, property, to support, comfort, care for, love and commit to each other. Why should such a couple be denied the societal benefits afforded to other such couples – pension benefits, spousal deductions. That they may or may not be having sex is no one’s business but their own.
As Pierre Trudeau remarked many years ago when he started us down this long slippery road, “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Either we take the father of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms at his word, or we don’t.
Feb 26: take a trip round the Beltway for more.