U.S. governors to Canada: Use NAFTA to relax duties on online purchases
WASHINGTON — Canada is being pressed for freer trade in online goods by a number of American states, with eight state governors writing a letter seeking an expansion of Canada’s low limits for online, duty-free purchases.
Their letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and U.S. trade czar Robert Lighthizer says the NAFTA talks are an opportunity to review the $20 limit for what Canadians can buy online without paying duties on foreign goods.
Canada has one of the strictest duty-free limits in the world for online goods — a mere fraction of the $800 Americans can spend on sites like Amazon and eBay without paying an import fee.
“Canada’s … threshold remains among the lowest in the industrialized world,” says the Nov. 21 letter, signed by the governors of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, Montana, Oregon, Utah and Virginia.