The short answer
Show a price a customer can actually pay. Canadian law treats a price made unattainable by fixed mandatory fees as false or misleading, and a disclaimer does not cure it. Sales tax is the one carve-out. Whether you display tax-in or tax-extra is your choice federally.
Two different rules meet on a pricing page, and small business owners routinely mix them up. The first is about fees: if the number you advertise is not the number someone can pay, you have a problem. The second is about sales tax: whether you have to charge it, and how you have to show it. They come from different statutes, they have different enforcers, and getting one right does not get you the other.
Rule one: the price has to be attainable
The Competition Act does not leave drip pricing to interpretation. It is written into the statute three times, in near-identical words. Under section 52(1.3): the making of a representation of a price that is not attainable due to fixed obligatory charges or fees constitutes a false or misleading representation, unless the obligatory charges or fees represent only an amount imposed on a purchaser by or under an Act of Parliament or the legislature of a province [1]. The same sentence appears at section 52.01(4.1) for electronic messages, and again at section 74.01(1.1) on the civil reviewable-conduct side [1].
Read the exception carefully, because it is narrow. The only fees you may leave out of the headline number are ones imposed by legislation on the purchaser. GST, HST and provincial sales taxes fit. Your booking fee, service fee, admin fee, processing fee, fuel surcharge, cleaning fee or "digital services fee" do not, because you imposed them, not a legislature. If a customer cannot buy at the number you printed without also paying your fee, the number is not attainable.
The common defensive move is a disclaimer - "from $99*" with an asterisk somewhere below the fold. That is weaker than owners expect. The Act instructs that the general impression conveyed by a representation, as well as its literal meaning, be taken into account in determining whether it is false or misleading [1]. That direction appears both in the criminal provision at section 52(4) and in the civil provisions at section 74.03(5) [1]. A page whose literal fine print is accurate but whose general impression is a price nobody can pay is exactly the situation those subsections were written for. It is also not necessary to prove that anyone was actually deceived [1].
The enforcement is real, if rarely aimed at businesses this size. The Competition Bureau is an independent law enforcement agency that protects and promotes competition for the benefit of Canadian consumers and businesses [3]. On the criminal track, a section 52 contravention on summary conviction carries a fine up to $200,000 or imprisonment up to one year [1]. On the civil track, a court may order administrative monetary penalties that for a corporation reach the greater of $10,000,000 - $15,000,000 for a subsequent order - and three times the value of the benefit derived [1]. Those numbers are calibrated for national advertisers. The point for a small business is not the ceiling; it is that the prohibition has no size floor.
One related trap while you are on the page: sale pricing. The Act makes it reviewable conduct to represent the price at which a product is ordinarily supplied unless you can establish that you sold a substantial volume at that price or higher within a reasonable period, or offered it at that price or higher in good faith for a substantial period [1]. A crossed-out "regular $400" you never charged is not a design flourish. It is the specific thing that subsection addresses.
Rule two: sales tax is a separate question
Nothing above tells you whether to show tax-included or tax-extra pricing. That comes from the Excise Tax Act, and the first question is not display - it is whether you have to charge tax at all.
The Act imposes GST on the recipient of a taxable supply made in Canada at the rate of 5% on the value of the consideration, with an additional provincial component in a participating province at that province's tax rate [2]. Zero-rated supplies are taxed at 0% [2]. Every person who makes a taxable supply collects that tax as agent of the Crown [2]. So the obligation runs through you whether you priced for it or not.
Who must register? Section 240(1) requires registration by every person who makes a taxable supply in Canada in the course of a commercial activity, with exceptions for a small supplier, for a person whose only commercial activity is making supplies of real property by way of sale otherwise than in the course of a business, and for a non-resident not carrying on business in Canada [2]. The small supplier definition in section 148(1) turns on the total consideration for taxable supplies that became due in the four immediately preceding calendar quarters, tested against $30,000 - or $50,000 where the person is a public service body [2]. Associates count toward the same total [2].
That is the statute. It is not tax advice about your business, and the tests have qualifications this article is not the place for. Confirm your own registration status with the tax authority directly rather than reading it off a web page, including this one.
Now the display question. Section 223(1) says a registrant making a taxable supply other than a zero-rated supply shall indicate to the recipient - either in a prescribed manner, or in the invoice, receipt or written agreement - either the consideration and the tax payable in a manner that clearly indicates the amount of the tax, or that the amount paid or payable includes the tax [2]. Both are permitted. Tax-in and tax-extra are both lawful, provided the customer can tell which one you mean.
Note where that duty attaches: to the invoice, receipt or agreement. It is a transaction-document rule, not an advertising rule. Your advertising is governed by the Competition Act and by your province.
Your province may be stricter
Federal law is the floor. Quebec's Consumer Protection Act prohibits charging a higher price for goods or services than the price advertised, and specifies that the advertised price must include the total amount the consumer must pay - while expressly providing that it need not include the Quebec sales tax or the GST [4]. It also requires that more emphasis be put on the advertised price than on the amounts of which it is made up [4]. That is a cleaner statement of the same instinct behind the federal drip-pricing rule, with the tax carve-out made explicit.
British Columbia comes at it from a different angle. Its Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act defines a deceptive act or practice as a representation, or any conduct by a supplier, having the capability, tendency or effect of deceiving or misleading a consumer or guarantor - and says it may occur before, during or after the consumer transaction [5]. "Capability or tendency" is a low bar. You do not need to have fooled anyone.
The harder question: publish a number or not?
Legal compliance is the easy half. The judgment call for most service businesses is whether to publish prices at all when every job is different.
A starting-at price with an honest scope generally beats "contact us for pricing". It does two jobs. It disqualifies people who were never in your range, before they book an hour of your time, which is the single largest hidden cost of a vague pricing page. And it gives an answer to the machines - when someone asks an assistant what a service like yours costs in their city, a page with a real number and a stated scope can be quoted; a page with a contact form cannot. Increasingly the buyer never reaches your site at all if nothing on it was quotable.
The way to do that safely is to attach the number to a defined unit of work. "Standard five-page site, $50 setup and $19 a month" is quotable. "Starting at $50" alone is not, because nobody knows what they get. Say what is included, say plainly what is not, and if there is a mandatory fee that every customer pays, put it in the headline number rather than the footnote - that is both the compliant choice and the one that produces fewer refund arguments.
Where publishing prices is the wrong call
Plenty of successful service businesses legitimately do not publish prices, and the advice above does not apply to them. If your work is genuinely bespoke - custom fabrication, complex renovations, litigation, anything where the same brief can vary tenfold depending on site conditions - a price page can mislead more than it helps. A prospect anchors on your lowest number, the real quote comes in at four times that, and you have spent your credibility before the conversation starts. You have also created a "regular price" narrative you may not be able to support.
The honest middle ground there is not a number but a range with the drivers named: what makes a job land at the low end, what pushes it to the high end, and what a typical project last year actually cost. That is still quotable, still filters buyers, and does not commit you to a figure you cannot hold.
Do this this week
Open your own pricing page and pick the largest number on it. Ask one question: can a customer pay exactly that and receive exactly what is described, with nothing mandatory added except tax imposed by a legislature? If the answer is no, move the mandatory fee into that number today. Then check that every price on the page says either "plus tax" or "tax included" - one word, one decision - and that your invoices match. That is an afternoon of work and it clears both rules at once.