A burden we all need to carry.
Right now there is an uproar over the provincial government’s plan to introduce HST. The plan is to harmonize provincial sales tax with GST bringing PST into a whole bunch of industries (restaurants, grocery stores among others) which had up to this point avoided them.
Business points to this new tax and scream about layoffs and jacked up consumer prices.
The NDP is rallying signatures. Editorials are lamblasting the Premier. People are griping to each other about how a) stupid and b) unfair the whole tax is.
What gets me about all of this is the seeming disconnect people have about why the HST is being introduced int he first place.
Taxes, as any political strategist (or person on the street for that matter) can tell you, aren’t popular. Why do governments bring them in? Because they can’t afford to supply the existing level of services (read education, health care, transportation infrastructure, etc) without a larger source of revenue.
Right now, BC, like the rest of the world, is in the midst of a recession. Profits are down, people are making less money and spending less of it. That means all sorts of traditional government taxes aren’t generating income like they used to. Yet at the same time, there aren’t fewer people going to the doctor (like is probably the case in the US’s privatized system) nor fewer people riding transit or going to school.
Canada and British Columbia have a terrific education system, and despite a lot of griping about hospital lines and other medical headaches, one of the best health care systems in the world. I don’t know about you, but I want to keep it that way and (ideally) continue to improve it. You don’t do that with less money – you do it with more money.
So when the provincial government looks at the balance sheet at the end of the fiscal year, they’re in an unpleasant conundrum: Keep services the same and yet somehow do so with withering profits. How can they do this? This simple answer is they can’t – at least not without figuring out a new revenue source.
Enter the HST.
While unpleasant, this new tax will go a long way to adding billions of dollars to the budget. In the end that will mean fewer cuts to the core services we all value. And that’s a good thing.