"Are you in favour of extinguishing the HST (harmonized sales tax) and reinstating the PST (provincial sales tax) in conjunction with the GST (goods and services tax)?"
IF you do not want the HST to continue in British Columbia, you must vote "Yes" to the convoluted, three-part referendum question shown above.
If, however, you support a shift of $1.9 billion in taxes from business to individuals, and are willing to shoulder the extra $600 million the HST collects - because it is not revenue neutral - then you must vote "No."
Using numbers from the government's own website, the choice is as simple as that. Those numbers show why "the fear-mongering about the cost of returning to GST is a crock," as one voluble but column-shy North Vancouverite put it.
We are being asked to buy a pig in a poke.
Pay about $2.5 billion more sales tax under the HST in 2011; $2B more in 2012/2013 and $1.5B every year thereafter - that's $8 billion more over four years than we would have paid without the HST.
Then we're expected to trust businesses to pass on their savings; trust corporations to be more competitive; and trust that the extra taxes we pay will improve the economy and create 24,400 new jobs by the end of the decade. Wow!
That's a heck of a lot of trust for $8 billion.
What irks me the most is the lack of integrity in the process.
Had the Liberals' first rationale for the tax been the truth, a referendum would have been unnecessary. If their only aim was to relieve businesses of paperwork, they could have harmonized the taxes, levied 12 per cent tax on items previously subject to GST/PST and left it at that. Everything else would be assessed GST as before.
But that would not have accomplished their real objective: the tax shift.
When our opposition ran broader and deeper than expected, all government and its corporate sponsors could hope for was that time and the weight of their combined advertising campaign would persuade us the foul-tasting medicine was good for us.
With so much at stake, the Liberals and Smart Tax Alliance groups set about investing heavily in the fight for a "No" vote.
But British Columbians are not stupid. Despite the insults of baffle-gabbing stick-men, their will cannot be gauged by asking three questions in one, and allowing only one answer.
The only question required was, "Do you want to keep the HST: Yes or No?" Everything else should have awaited the result of the referendum.
In the event the tax was rejected, whichever formula was to be chosen from the many available should have been developed by an all-party committee of the legislature.
But the last thing the Liberals and their quasi-political business supporters wanted was to involve people in the discussion.
One of the most disturbing features of this exercise has been the pretence that, somehow, the HST initiative was the arms-length work of government, independent of corporate self-interest.
Yet in 2009 we learned from Anne McMullin, president of the North Vancouver Chamber of Commerce, that the B.C. Chamber has lobbied for a harmonized tax since 1989.
The mastheads of the groups represented by the Smart Tax Alliance and the Vancouver Board of Trade reveal a myriad of crossmemberships in companies and organizations that have a vested interest in the HST.
How many of those organizations lobbied for the HST without first asking individual members to approve that path?
When the tax was first announced and the North Vancouver chamber immediately jumped on board, I asked them that question.
"We are thinking of doing a survey," was the reply; and to be fair some chambers did.
As Benjamin Alldritt wrote in the North Shore News on Oct. 23, 2009, "The September survey drew 90 responses from the chamber's 769 members. Of the respondents, 71 did not support the introduction of the harmonized sales tax. . . ."
The Tri-Cities chamber reported 84.5 per cent opposition from 150 members, and a November 2009 survey by the Saanich Peninsula chamber reported 75.7 per cent opposition from 37 members who felt their businesses would be negatively impacted.
These and other results merely applied the spurs to the pro-HST side.
Today, the B.C. chamber and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business both report increased support for the tax since Premier Christy Clark promised a two per cent reduction over three years. One page of the government website
claims the reduction begins in 2011. In reality, it begins in 2012.
Did chamber opponents change their minds in the face of the propaganda? Or did they decide to remain silent and await a less risky opportunity to voice their opposition privately in the referendum?
. . .
Last week, I should have noted that Coun. Guy Heywood supported the motion to send the Port Metro Vancouver Low Level Road realignment proposal forward to the next phase. The motion was defeated.
rimco@shaw.ca
