This irks me like crazy. Cocksuckers . They take advantage because Canadians are mild mannered.
Credit card fees are just one of the things for which Canadians pay bafflingly higher prices than everyone else.
Canadians may soon be docked an extra charge for paying with their credit card. Henceforth, it you buy something with a credit card (other than debit or cash), it’s now legal for retailers to tack on a surcharge of as much as 2.4 per cent.
The reform was made necessary due to the fact that Canadian retailers are being utterly hosed by credit card fees. Across most of Europe, credit card companies will ding a retailer less than one per cent of a customer’s total bill. But in Canada, this “interchange” rate is 40 per cent higher at 1.4 per cent. As a CBC analysis recently noted, Canadians pay “some of the highest interchange fees in the world.”
Credit card fees are just one of the things for which Canadians pay bafflingly higher prices than everyone else. Below, a quick summary of some of the things that are pricier in Canada than anywhere else on earth.
Cell phone charges
One of the first things noticed by newcomers to Canada is the eyewatering cost of maintaining a mobile phone. In most of Europe, it can cost as little as $30 for a monthly cell phone plan with 100 gigabytes of mobile data. In Canada, that kind of plan would run $144, according to the Finnish telecom analyst Rewheel. “Prices in the Canadian wireless market … continue to be the highest or among the highest in the world,” they wrote in a 2021 report.
As to why, market consolidation is partly to blame. Three companies (Telus, Rogers and Bell) control more than 90 per cent of the Canadian wireless market, and federal regulations make it extraordinarily difficult for cheaper foreign competitors to enter the market. As a result, domestic telecoms are able to quite comfortably buy up competitors and jack up rates without worrying that they’ll be undercut by a streamlined competitor. Five years ago, for instance, Bell purchased Manitoba Telecom Services, one of Canada’s only mobile providers not yet owned by the “Big Three.” Within months of the acquisition, Bell initiated an across-the-board hike to the cost of MTS services.
Air travel
In 2016, the flight website Kiwi.com ranked countries by the average cost of flying 100 kilometres. When controlling for smaller outliers like Oman and Taiwan, Canadian air travel was noticeably more expensive than any of its peer countries. Take Air Canada or WestJet, and that 100 km would cost $123.52. In the U.S., meanwhile, even a full-service airline would run only $23.55. At the time, it made Canada the sixth most expensive country in the world to buy an airline ticket.
Here again, market consolidation plays a part. More than 90 per cent of scheduled domestic air travel is in the hands of either WestJet or Air Canada — and federal law is quite vigilant about keeping out foreign competitors. The likes of Spirit Airlines or Ryanair would love to swoop into the Canadian market with discounted fares, but airlines are shut out if their ownership is more than 49 per cent foreign.
It’s also not helping that Canada also has the world’s most expensive airports. The cost of landing an airliner at Toronto Pearson is way higher than plenty of other major airports, including London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle. Consolidation is also to blame here; while many of the world’s airports are private businesses competing with one another for traffic, all of Canada’s airports are de facto government entities.
Health care (excepting the United States, of course)
This is a category that the Americans will be dominating for some years to come: It’s a well-known fact that the United States spends obscene per capita amounts of money on health care despite not having universal coverage. But the searing cost of the U.S. system often serves to distract Canadians from the fact that we’re in a close second place. That’s right; even in a land where people are dying in emergency rooms and millions don’t have a family doctor, health care is still costing us more than almost any other society on the planet.
In its regular indices of global health-care systems by efficiency, the U.S.-based Commonwealth Fund consistently ranks Canada as being second only to the United States in terms of health-care spending as ranked against performance. In other words, we pay more for health care than anyone else except the Americans, and get the least in return.
It’s a trend that’s also been noticed by the number-crunchers at the right-leaning Fraser Institute. “On an age-adjusted basis … no nation spent more on its universal access health insurance system than Canada as a share of GDP,” they wrote in a recent report. The likes of Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg all spend comparatively less on universal health care, and outrank Canada on basically every metric of health-care performance, from wait times to per capita hospital beds.
Motor fuels (at least in the Western Hemisphere)
For now, Europe still has us beat in this category. Gasoline in Norway is currently selling at $3 per litre, which is 70 cents higher than even the most stomach-churning pump prices in coastal B.C.
But Canada absolutely tops the leaderboard when it comes to the Western Hemisphere. There isn’t a single other city in the Americas that is fuelling their cars with $2.30/litre petrol, as is the current rate in Metro Vancouver.
The reason for this can be pinned pretty squarely on taxes. Even before the advent of carbon taxes, all three levels of Canadian governments got pretty accustomed to wetting their beaks in motor fuels. Between GST, excise taxes, provincial taxes and municipal transit surcharges, Canadian governments are taking as much as 40 cents per litre before the carbon levy is even calculated. Added to that is a growing latticework of Canadian clean fuel standards that is raising production costs by as much as 15 cents per litre.
Milk
Any day-tripper to the U.S. knows that Canadian dairy comes at a significant premium as compared to American milk and cheese. But the disparity also holds up at a global level. In 2017, an Argentinian retail association commissioned a global study of milk prices in an effort to prove that Argentinians were paying the world’s highest dairy prices.
They were almost right: Argentina turned out to be the world’s second-most expensive country for milk, behind only Canada. The reason for this is extremely simple: Since the 1970s, Canada’s dairy sector has been under the top-down control of a state-sanctioned cartel that explicitly works to artificially raise prices by limiting supply. Supply management is doing its job remarkably well, in other words.
Housing (obviously)
It turns out there are vanishingly few places around the world where it’s become normal for home ownership to be almost laughably out of reach for anyone earning a median salary. While there are still places where the raw cost of real estate is higher (such as New York City or Hong Kong), Canada is a consistent contender when it comes to nationwide housing prices as a share of income.
The most recent quarterly data from the OECD shows Canada tied with Portugal and the Netherlands for the worst price to income ratio in the developed world. Just this week, UBS was once again ranking Toronto as the world’s “bubblyiest” housing market, with Vancouver in sixth place.
As to why houses got so expensive, the easy answer is that Canada has a chronic housing shortage. If houses were a normal commodity, the market would simply build new ones until the prices stabilized. But in Canada, there’s a whole lot of red tape making it harder and more expensive to do so.
nationalpost.com
Credit card fees are just one of the things for which Canadians pay bafflingly higher prices than everyone else.
Canadians may soon be docked an extra charge for paying with their credit card. Henceforth, it you buy something with a credit card (other than debit or cash), it’s now legal for retailers to tack on a surcharge of as much as 2.4 per cent.
The reform was made necessary due to the fact that Canadian retailers are being utterly hosed by credit card fees. Across most of Europe, credit card companies will ding a retailer less than one per cent of a customer’s total bill. But in Canada, this “interchange” rate is 40 per cent higher at 1.4 per cent. As a CBC analysis recently noted, Canadians pay “some of the highest interchange fees in the world.”
Credit card fees are just one of the things for which Canadians pay bafflingly higher prices than everyone else. Below, a quick summary of some of the things that are pricier in Canada than anywhere else on earth.
Cell phone charges
One of the first things noticed by newcomers to Canada is the eyewatering cost of maintaining a mobile phone. In most of Europe, it can cost as little as $30 for a monthly cell phone plan with 100 gigabytes of mobile data. In Canada, that kind of plan would run $144, according to the Finnish telecom analyst Rewheel. “Prices in the Canadian wireless market … continue to be the highest or among the highest in the world,” they wrote in a 2021 report.
As to why, market consolidation is partly to blame. Three companies (Telus, Rogers and Bell) control more than 90 per cent of the Canadian wireless market, and federal regulations make it extraordinarily difficult for cheaper foreign competitors to enter the market. As a result, domestic telecoms are able to quite comfortably buy up competitors and jack up rates without worrying that they’ll be undercut by a streamlined competitor. Five years ago, for instance, Bell purchased Manitoba Telecom Services, one of Canada’s only mobile providers not yet owned by the “Big Three.” Within months of the acquisition, Bell initiated an across-the-board hike to the cost of MTS services.
Air travel
In 2016, the flight website Kiwi.com ranked countries by the average cost of flying 100 kilometres. When controlling for smaller outliers like Oman and Taiwan, Canadian air travel was noticeably more expensive than any of its peer countries. Take Air Canada or WestJet, and that 100 km would cost $123.52. In the U.S., meanwhile, even a full-service airline would run only $23.55. At the time, it made Canada the sixth most expensive country in the world to buy an airline ticket.
Here again, market consolidation plays a part. More than 90 per cent of scheduled domestic air travel is in the hands of either WestJet or Air Canada — and federal law is quite vigilant about keeping out foreign competitors. The likes of Spirit Airlines or Ryanair would love to swoop into the Canadian market with discounted fares, but airlines are shut out if their ownership is more than 49 per cent foreign.
It’s also not helping that Canada also has the world’s most expensive airports. The cost of landing an airliner at Toronto Pearson is way higher than plenty of other major airports, including London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle. Consolidation is also to blame here; while many of the world’s airports are private businesses competing with one another for traffic, all of Canada’s airports are de facto government entities.
Health care (excepting the United States, of course)
This is a category that the Americans will be dominating for some years to come: It’s a well-known fact that the United States spends obscene per capita amounts of money on health care despite not having universal coverage. But the searing cost of the U.S. system often serves to distract Canadians from the fact that we’re in a close second place. That’s right; even in a land where people are dying in emergency rooms and millions don’t have a family doctor, health care is still costing us more than almost any other society on the planet.
In its regular indices of global health-care systems by efficiency, the U.S.-based Commonwealth Fund consistently ranks Canada as being second only to the United States in terms of health-care spending as ranked against performance. In other words, we pay more for health care than anyone else except the Americans, and get the least in return.
It’s a trend that’s also been noticed by the number-crunchers at the right-leaning Fraser Institute. “On an age-adjusted basis … no nation spent more on its universal access health insurance system than Canada as a share of GDP,” they wrote in a recent report. The likes of Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg all spend comparatively less on universal health care, and outrank Canada on basically every metric of health-care performance, from wait times to per capita hospital beds.
Motor fuels (at least in the Western Hemisphere)
For now, Europe still has us beat in this category. Gasoline in Norway is currently selling at $3 per litre, which is 70 cents higher than even the most stomach-churning pump prices in coastal B.C.
But Canada absolutely tops the leaderboard when it comes to the Western Hemisphere. There isn’t a single other city in the Americas that is fuelling their cars with $2.30/litre petrol, as is the current rate in Metro Vancouver.
The reason for this can be pinned pretty squarely on taxes. Even before the advent of carbon taxes, all three levels of Canadian governments got pretty accustomed to wetting their beaks in motor fuels. Between GST, excise taxes, provincial taxes and municipal transit surcharges, Canadian governments are taking as much as 40 cents per litre before the carbon levy is even calculated. Added to that is a growing latticework of Canadian clean fuel standards that is raising production costs by as much as 15 cents per litre.
Milk
Any day-tripper to the U.S. knows that Canadian dairy comes at a significant premium as compared to American milk and cheese. But the disparity also holds up at a global level. In 2017, an Argentinian retail association commissioned a global study of milk prices in an effort to prove that Argentinians were paying the world’s highest dairy prices.
They were almost right: Argentina turned out to be the world’s second-most expensive country for milk, behind only Canada. The reason for this is extremely simple: Since the 1970s, Canada’s dairy sector has been under the top-down control of a state-sanctioned cartel that explicitly works to artificially raise prices by limiting supply. Supply management is doing its job remarkably well, in other words.
Housing (obviously)
It turns out there are vanishingly few places around the world where it’s become normal for home ownership to be almost laughably out of reach for anyone earning a median salary. While there are still places where the raw cost of real estate is higher (such as New York City or Hong Kong), Canada is a consistent contender when it comes to nationwide housing prices as a share of income.
The most recent quarterly data from the OECD shows Canada tied with Portugal and the Netherlands for the worst price to income ratio in the developed world. Just this week, UBS was once again ranking Toronto as the world’s “bubblyiest” housing market, with Vancouver in sixth place.
As to why houses got so expensive, the easy answer is that Canada has a chronic housing shortage. If houses were a normal commodity, the market would simply build new ones until the prices stabilized. But in Canada, there’s a whole lot of red tape making it harder and more expensive to do so.
All the things that cost more in Canada than anywhere else on earth
Credit card fees are just one of the things for which Canadians pay bafflingly higher prices than everyone else
nationalpost.com
