Dear Editor:
I wish to correct the misinformation in Wendy Qureshi's July 10 letter, HST on Hydro Bills Adds Up:
Before the HST came into effect, BC Hydro applied five per cent GST and seven per cent PST to our hydro bills, but a provincial residential energy sales tax exemption rebated the seven per cent PST and the net sales tax we paid was five per cent. When the HST came into effect, the policy remained the same, ie. the provincial government provides a rebate of seven per cent which is equal to the provincial tax component of the HST. That means we pay the same five per cent sales tax on hydro bills that we did before when we had the PST and GST combination.
While I am upset like most people at the way the government brought in the HST, I am absolutely outraged at the campaign of misinformation on both sides of the fight, although I find it to be far more prevalent from the Fight HST side. I also get very upset at knee-jerk reactions by people who have not spent even five minutes looking into the issue. I found this link after searching for about 30 seconds: www.bchydro. com/youraccount/content/ hst_and_your_bill.jsp which explains my first paragraph in more detail.
One of the key differences with the HST that some prefer to ignore is that the PST was applied at every level of transactions in the manufacture and sale of a good. There were no input tax credits for PST as there are for HST. The impact is that we used to pay the seven per cent PST three or four times on a manufactured good but it was embedded and we did not know it. Now we pay the seven per cent provincial component of the HST only once on a manufactured good. The five per cent GST component has not changed.
Jim Mason North Vancouver
