The Carter Commission and the Value-Added Tax (VAT): A Prescient Review of the VAT Before its Time Had Come

Abstract

It might seem a strange commemoration of the Carter Royal Commission on Taxation to review the Commission’s consideration of value-added tax (VAT) reform. The Commission neither favoured consumption as the primary tax base nor endorsed the VAT as the most suitable sales tax from which to tax consumption at the federal level. Nevertheless, the Carter Report offers a useful case study on the VAT for a number of reasons including that it offers an independent assessment of the merits of VAT before the convergence towards VAT that has resulted in its near ubiquity as the sales tax of choice across most of the world today.

Note: "Reproduced by permission of Thomson Reuters Canada limited."

Keywords: tax, VAT, tax history, Canada

JEL Classification: H2, N00, K34