This post answers a question left open in our article on tax-exclusive Merchant Center pricing: submitting a tax-exclusive price to Google is not the same question as the all-inclusive price Quebec law requires in an advertisement. The first is about what Google accepts in a feed, the second about what a consumer is entitled to see before paying. This post covers the second, from the standpoint of someone who configures ads, not a lawyer: the legal passages are a practitioner's reading, not legal advice, and the official source is linked every time. Re-read on September 22, 2026.
The rule, in two sections
Section 224 of the Consumer Protection Act lists prohibited pricing practices. Three paragraphs concern us directly. Paragraph a) prohibits giving, in an advertisement, less prominence to the price of a bundle of goods or services than to the price of one of the items making it up. Paragraph b) prohibits disclosing the amount of periodic payments without also disclosing the total price, or without making it stand out more clearly. Paragraph c), the most cited, prohibits charging a price higher than the one advertised.
Section 224.1 supplies the definition that makes 224 c) operative for an online store: the advertised price must include the total of all sums the consumer will have to pay to obtain the good or service, but that price may exclude Quebec sales tax and the federal goods and services tax. The advertised price must also stand out more clearly than the sums that make it up, when those sums are shown separately.
Combined, these two sections give a simple rule to apply: everything mandatory to obtain the product goes into the displayed price, except the two sales taxes. What is optional, such as shipping insurance or an à la carte service the customer can decline, can stay outside it, provided it is clearly presented as optional.
What counts as mandatory, and what does not
The case law cited by the firms tracking this file (Blakes, McCarthy Tétrault) largely concerns "drip pricing": a price displayed in large type, followed by additional charges revealed later in the purchase flow, such as service fees, booking fees, or processing fees. The courts hearing these cases examine whether these charges are genuinely avoidable by the consumer or are, in practice, unavoidable to obtain the advertised good or service. A charge nobody can practically avoid is a component of the price, not a supplement.
For an online store, the most frequent candidates for this test are shipping fees when no pickup option exists, handling fees applied systematically, and so-called "eco-responsibility" or environmental management fees that some product categories impose by regulation. An optional shipping fee, with an in-store or pickup-point option genuinely available and clearly offered at a visible price before the item is added to the cart, stays outside the displayed price without difficulty. A mandatory shipping fee, because the store has no pickup point, falls, in our reading, into the same total as the product price.
What this means for a Shopping ad
The price attribute of a Canadian Merchant Center feed is already tax-exclusive of sales tax, as we detailed in our article on tax-exclusive Merchant Center pricing: Google requires this independently of Quebec law, and the two rules point in the same direction on this specific point. The Shopping ad displays a product price excluding GST and QST, which is compliant with both regimes at once.
Where the two rules diverge is on ancillary fees. Google documents that shipping costs must be submitted exclusive of tax in the shipping attribute, but Google says nothing about whether those fees are mandatory or optional under Quebec law. If your store charges shipping fees that no customer can avoid, a Shopping ad showing only the product price, with no shipping amount visible before the click, does not lie by Google's standard, but it reproduces the drip-pricing structure Quebec law targets: a displayed price lower than what the customer will actually pay to get the product home, with no pickup option.
Two options reduce this risk without breaking the feed. Set a free-shipping threshold low enough that most carts reach it, which makes the displayed price and the paid price identical in most cases. Or publish a shipping-cost table, reachable from the product page before the item is added to the cart, which documents that the customer knew the total amount before committing, even if that amount does not appear in the ad itself.
What this means for a Meta ad
A Meta ad displaying a price, whether in a dynamic catalogue creative or a static visual, is subject to the same rule as any other advertisement in Quebec: the medium has no bearing on the obligation. The product catalogue used by Meta's dynamic ads generally reuses the same feed as Merchant Center, which means the same tax-exclusive price shows up on both, with the same grey area on non-mandatory ancillary fees depending on your shipping setup.
The point specific to Meta to watch is the ad copy itself, written by a human rather than generated from a feed: a line such as "from $49, shipping extra" is defensible if shipping is genuinely optional and its cost easy to check, but a price mention with no disclosure of known mandatory charges at the time of writing exposes the advertiser to the same drip-pricing risk, this time in the ad text rather than in a feed attribute.
The control table we use in audits
| Charge | Mandatory to obtain the product | Included in advertised price | Recommended treatment |
|---|---|---|---|
| GST, QST | Yes, but exclusion permitted by 224.1 | No | Leave out of displayed price |
| Shipping, no pickup option | Yes | The legal test requires it | Include in the price, or show a starting-from price with shipping visible before cart |
| Shipping, in-store pickup available | No | No, if pickup is genuinely offered | Leave out of the price, mention the pickup option |
| Systematic handling fees | Yes | Yes | Include in the advertised price |
| Optional shipping insurance checkbox | No | No | Leave out of the price, unchecked by default |
| Regulated environmental fees (e.g. tires, electronics) | Depends on the category and applicable regulation | Verify case by case | Have a legal advisor rule on the category concerned |
What Merchant Center compliance does not give you
A feed that perfectly follows Google's tax-exclusive rule, with zero flags in diagnostics, has received no validation of Consumer Protection Act compliance from Google. The two control systems are independent: one automated and technical, the other legal and grounded in the commercial reality of your fees. An account can be spotless for Google and exposed in Quebec at the same time, if mandatory shipping fees are documented nowhere before checkout.
Fifteen-minute check
- Open a typical product page while logged out and with nothing in the cart. Note the displayed price.
- Add the product to the cart, enter a Quebec shipping address, and proceed to the pre-tax subtotal. Compare that subtotal to the price noted in step 1. If the subtotal is higher for a reason other than the quantity chosen, identify the charge that created the gap.
- Check whether an in-store or pickup-point option exists and whether it is offered before the checkout step, not just on a shipping policy page.
- If the charge identified in step 2 applies to every order with no possible exception, treat it as mandatory under section 224.1 and either fold it into the advertised price or disclose it explicitly before the item is added to the cart.
- Run the same test starting from an active Shopping ad and an active Meta catalogue ad, beginning from the ad click rather than the product page.
This post does not replace legal advice on a specific case, particularly for product categories subject to regulated environmental fees, where the line between mandatory and optional depends on the regulation applicable to the product. What we check systematically in audits, for our Google Ads clients in Montréal and our Meta Ads clients in Montréal, is the consistency between the ad's price, the product page's price, and the pre-tax subtotal, the same four-point consistency we describe in our article on tax-exclusive Merchant Center pricing. The next question, sending data outside Quebec through a pixel or a conversion API, is covered in a separate post.