That marching sound you’ve been hearing is the anti-HST, pro-NDP foot soldiers pounding the pavement around B.C. to oust Liberal MLAs from office. It’s a good time, therefore, to reflect on what’s really got the recall brigade in the marching mood.
The Public Offerings pie chart would divide the slices roughly 90% political, 5% fiscal and 5% tribal.
Just deserts indeed for the long-in-the-tooth Gordon Campbell Liberal juggernaut that so badly botched the implementation of what years hence will likely be adjudged to have been the right medicine for the era’s economic anemia.
In the here and now, however, it’s viewed as merely a bitter pill to swallow – the likes of which citizens in productivity laggard land can’t stomach. They prefer everything free and easy. Like a Sunday morning. But business rarely abides by pop-song scripts – no matter how loud the sermon from the populist pulpit gets.
More people are doubtless resigned to swallowing a few bitter pills now to promote future economic recovery.
The failed effort to recall Oak Bay-Gordon Head MLA Ida Chong is but one illustration.
Campbell’s top-down approach to instituting the HST qualifies as one of his biggest gaffes this side of indulging in unchauffered driving adventures in Maui.
But most HST opposition pretty much boils down to a pair of emotional hot buttons:
- it’s misleadingly being damned as an additional tax; and
- it was instituted by the Campbell Liberals.
Objective assessment of its long-term impact on improving B.C.’s economy and streamlining business operations don’t much enter into the public shouting match. That’s unfortunate, because those numbers are making more sense all the time.
Even restaurant owners, if they’re being honest, will concede that tougher drinking-driving regulations have inflicted a far heavier toll on their businesses than has the HST.
A recent report from Jack Mintz, director of the School of Public Policy, underscores the HST’s economic benefits.
The Twitter dispatch version: prudent decisions don’t always win air kisses and group hugs from the masses.
As Mintz points out: “The HST may not be popular in B.C., but it has drastically lowered the overall cost of doing business, thereby making B.C. one of the most attractive business environments in Canada. Eliminating the HST might be good politics, but it’s bad policy.”
Meanwhile, the BC Progress Board’s annual benchmark report released in late 2010 pointed out that gum-flapping over “how to replace the lost revenue and the practicality of refunding the HST already paid miss the most important point: B.C. needs a lower marginal effective tax rate to improve capital investment and productivity, and keeping the HST is the best way to lower it.”
So even if you reject such reports as being skewed by political/business leanings, most people handy with a calculator and blessed with some common sense would have to concede that merging two separate government tax processes into one is an improvement for all businesses. Returning to the GST/PST era with all its process duplications and the added complexity and expense of re-retooling accounting procedures is a non-starter for progress in B.C.
The HST is not all Mozart and maypole dancing, but it’s more far-sighted than the alternatives proposed by its opponents, whose options thus far have yet to progress much beyond do nothing or do what wasn’t working well before.