Talk:Goods and Services Tax

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AFAIK GST is just another name for VAT. Maybe the term was invented by Roger Douglas in an effort to make his new tax easier to sell, I don't know, but googles for things like 'difference GST VAT' didn't turn up anything useful.

So, the GST page is now just a redirect to VAT.

-- pm67nz

That's not really an acceptable solution for Canada, so I have revived the disambiguation page.

Canadian pages that link to Goods and Services Tax will expect to find the information contained in Goods and Services Tax (Canada) (that is, information about the very Canada-specific political controversy and so forth). Getting redirected to Value-added tax is confusing and NOT what the person clicking was looking for.

I will go ahead and change any such links to point to the (Canada) page instead, but that won't stop people from going ahead and creating new links in future edits... in nearly all circumstances, such links should NEVER go to the Value-added tax page.

The above applies to Canada, but could just as easily apply to New Zealand and other countries... "Goods and Services Tax" is not just the name of a tax, it's also the shorthand name for a political controversy in most of the countries that adopted it. In fact, examination shows that all of the "what links here" links pointing to Goods and Services Tax and GST in Canadian (and Australian and New Zealand) pages are politically-oriented and not one was in the context of tax accounting. The Canadian pages no longer show up because I've edited them all to point to Goods and Services Tax (Canada) and GST (Canada), but no doubt new links will be created in future edits.

P.T. Aufrette 07:28, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)