Catching walleye can be taxing

[alfredo]

Fishing season starts today and the usual flotilla of small and large water craft spilling over with hungry anglers will be heading out to their favourite lucky holes on Lake Nipissing.

Any point of land, rocky shoal or inlet will suffice, although there's a perpetual caravan of boats circling the outflow pipe a few hundred feet west of the city's sewage treatment facility.

Most of the anglers will be targeting Nipissing's famous tasty walleye as they linger offshore for blossoming schools of minnows to replenish the energy spent on the spawning beds this spring.

There's always a rush to fill the frying pans at this time of year before the walleye head out into deeper and colder water sometime mid-June.

But it's not a cheap dinner and the government feeds on anglers much like fishermen feed on walleye.

And any attempt to define the difference between taxes, surcharges and user fees is a lot like putting an energetic leach on a hook.

Fishing licences are a prime example of a user fee which acts eerily similar to a tax because they fund the bureaucratic efforts to manage the resource. Most people don't mind this method because it's specific and appears to help their chances of catching a fish.

Boaters, of course, now need a licence to operate small water craft and if you've taken the exam you know it's just another tax grab. It might be better if they said the money goes directly to the search and rescue divers who might someday fish us out of the drink.

Of course, every piece of your fishing equipment was taxed three or four times before it got tangled up in your cheap plastic tackle box made in China.

And, more so this summer than any other, anybody fuelling their inboard/outboard yacht for a cruise might want to sit down for the experience. The provincial and federal governments are drooling over the high price of gasoline because the HST is 13% — which means the higher the tab, the more they rake in.

Here's a quick rundown on how much tax you pay on your gasoline. It costs me $3,000 a year to drive 30,000 kilometres when the price of fuel is $1 a litre. (My car burns 10 litres to drive 100 km). This year, if the cost of gas is $1.50 per litre, it will cost about $4,500.

That adds up to $300 for the federal excise tax (10 cents a litre) and almost $450 for the provincial excise tax (14.7 cents per litre), but the HST is 13% of the total.

If my fuel bill was $3,000 at $1 a litre, about $390 was HST. But with a fuel bill of $4,500, the government is raking in $585 in HST for the same amount of gasoline.

It wouldn't be so bad if they spent it wisely or put the windfall down on the debt.

But as the G8-G20 summits proved, the government wasted millions on trinkets and shiny things for no good reason.

Just don't think about it too much while you're floating out on Lake Nipissing trying to catch a fish worth about $999 a fillet — and don't drink and boat.

The fine for boozing on the water is a killer and there's about $1,000 in victim impact surcharges on top of the lawyer's bill — which, naturally, is subject to the HST.

[gofishing]

Yes, fishing is becoming a very expensive sport/pass time. Not cool, if you actually calculate the cost of catching and keeping one fish. It's ridiculous!