This amendment proposes to amend the existing section 45 of the Customs Act to introduce a definition of “sold for export to Canada”, which currently appears in Customs Act regulations.
To answer your question as to the rationale for this, in certain circumstances, purchasers may be paying duties on the lower price, and usually, this happens when an importer is not the purchaser in Canada, for example, a non-resident importer that is importing on behalf of a retailer located in Canada, or a foreign company that is doing a transaction on behalf of its Canadian subsidiary.
By defining “sold for export to Canada”, the idea is to clarify the amount on which duties owed to the government must be based upon, and to ensure that all importers are on a level playing field by using the same transaction, which is to say the last sale prior to export to a purchaser in Canada, rather than the value of a prior transaction in the supply chain that happens between two foreign entities.