Shipping to Canada - Customs

I think this question comes up periodically, but I don't seem to remember the answers and they are far far away, so let's try it again here.
What are the custom duties on the knives shipped to Canada?

Thanks,

M

For packages coming from the USA, no duties because of the Free Trade Agreement but receivers may have to pay sales tax plus a "handling fee".

For postal delivery, sometimes things will get by without any tax or handling fee. If it doesn't, it's a $5-8 fee for the privilege of paying tax. For UPS, FedEx and DHL, the handling fee is called the customs brokerage fee and is $30-$50. Nothing gets by these guys without being taxed.

Oh, an duties and tax are separate items. For packages coming from anywhere other than the USA, we can get dinged for an import duty plus sales tax plus the handling fee.

The real question is what $ do you put on a knife when shipping? It seems like a lot to expect the folks at the border to accurately verify the price of a custom/semi-custom knife.

They won't be able to verify the value/price of a custom piece. However, some customs officers seem to be diligent about looking up costs online for off-the-shelf items where the sender under-reported the value. That happened with something I received just earlier this week.

In the past, I have sent stuff out via Express and even with item declared at full value, there seemed to have been no problem with customs. Has anybody had similar experience?

M

Express is still US Postal, right? Doesn't seem to matter what specific postal delivery method is used, just that it's postal versus the others. It's really luck of the draw, I find, for items sent by postal. Unless... and now that I think about it there is an unless... unless the labeling on the package makes it obvious that it's an ordered product going across the border. In those cases it's much more likely to be tagged for taxation.

Use USPS, and the duties aren't bad. Just sales tax, if the knife is American (yours, of course are).
I've been getting items claimed at a low value an it has worked perfectly, every time.

I think most Customs agents take the claimed values at face value.

I was just "lucky" enough to have a recent whetstone pass by a customs agent who, somehow, figured the stated value for a rock wasn't realistic and looked up its actual value. Maybe the stated value was still too high for non-knife folks and he wanted to find out what the hell someone is doing buying and shipping a brick-like rock for