Sales tax on seeds works against lower carbon footprint, expert and home growers say
CBC
Nicola Moore says it was the pandemic that triggered her interest in growing food.
"My parents have always had a garden my whole life," she said. "I never put two and two together until I had a family of my own. And then when we went through the pandemic, I think it was 2020, I got scared and I wasn't sure how I was going to feed my family breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day.
"And, you know, the grocery stores had long lines, and I just was not confident about that. So I thought, how can I help my family? And that was learning how to grow my own food."
Moore grows beets, beans, carrots, cucumbers, peas, radishes, lettuce, onions, peppers and tomatoes, both at home in Hamilton, Ont., and in a nearby community allotment.
"It's been two years of steady learning, gardening, researching, and now my next level is canning and preserving for the winter time."
Moore says the savings are significant. But they are also less than they could be, because both the seeds and the seedlings she buys to plant her garden are subject to provincial and federal sales tax while foods grown from the same seeds that may be imported to Canada, or trucked into cities over great distances, are not.
"When you look at our recent stats, it seems as though the gardening rate in Canada is at an all time high," said Sylvain Charlebois, scientific director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University.
"People want to grow more food for a variety of reasons. One is to be proud of the food they grow. They want to do more for themselves. They want better quality. They want to reduce the carbon footprint of our food systems. But many, many citizens actually also want to grow food to save money."
The tax system, Charlebois says, works against them, because while a lettuce imported from California and sold at the supermarket is not saddled with sales tax, a baby lettuce grown in Canada for planting in a home garden is taxed.
Canada's carbon tax may not be popular in all quarters, but it does penalize those who have a larger carbon footprint, while rewarding behaviours that shrinks it.
But Canada's sales tax regime on food does the opposite, offering tax benefits to those who have a larger footprint, while taxing those who reduce it, creating what economists call a "perverse incentive" that works at cross purposes to the carbon tax.
Canada depends heavily on fruit and vegetables imported from outside the country at considerable environmental cost.
"The carbon footprint is quite significant," said Charlebois. "This is the way we feed ourselves. We truck things in."
Canada's climate makes it hard to replace all of the food coming from places like California and Mexico, but Charlebois says skilled growers can time their plantings and harvesting to have different foods ripen at different times of spring, summer and fall.