When making a purchase, customers may notice a change in the price of alcohol starting on April 1.

Starting in April, the federal “alcohol escalator tax” will rise by 4.7%. According to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the federal excise tax on beer, wine, and spirits will cost taxpayers countrywide an additional $100 million over the course of the next year.

“It’s a constant barrage of increasing prices,” says Saint John Ale House owner Jesse Vergen. “So yeah it’s a little tough to swallow.”

The list of rising expenses includes the most recent tax hike. Vergen adds that everything is more costly than it has ever been, including food and power, and he hopes that the federal government would intervene to slow down the rate increase.

He still doesn’t know how the tax increase would affect his daily business operations. He hopes not to need to increase drink prices in order to make ends meet.

“It’s something we are going to have to look at and look at our business model and see how sustainable it is for us to eat the cost because we can’t just keep putting up the price of beer,” Vergen says. “There comes a level where people will only spend X amount of dollars on a pint of beer.”

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SOURCE: CTV News Atlantic
PHOTO CREDIT: CTV News Atlantic