What follows is a couple of ideas for editorials that haven’t quite matured. They may grow to be full-fledged rants in the future, or they could get all they deserve here today.
• The B.C. Liberals just can’t seem to get out of their own way. Much of it has to do with poor communication, and in at least one instance, the people of this province are going to pay for it.
The HST fiasco is a case in point. In a couple of months, both large operations and small family-run shops will have to deal with the accounting and logistical challenges of charging and accounting for both the PST and GST.
The B.C. Liberals wanted to go the progressive, logical route and bring us in line with other provinces by implementing a harmonized tax, the HST. Problem is, they said in the past they would not do such a thing.
The people of this province got so caught up in what they perceived to be deception by the Liberals (wasn’t it just a good decision based upon further review?), they voted against implementing the HST, even after Premier Christy Clark sweetened the pot and said the flat tax would go down to 10 per cent from its current 12 per cent — we sure liked the easy math that presented.
So, a good idea dies and business people and consumers are stuck with a cumbersome and more expensive tax system.
We are fond of saying in this space the people are always correct. Well, in this instance, they were wrong about the nuts and bolts (the tax), but right about the message they sent to the Liberals regarding their communication ineptitude.
• We received a tsunami warning from the provincial emergency program in the wee hours of the morning Sunday, followed about 30 minutes later by a cancellation of that warning at 3:15 a.m.
If this was a real and present danger, how exactly would you, the person who lives on the coast, find out about it? More and more people don’t bother with a land line for a phone. We are not tied into one local radio or television station. The internet is better at presenting ridiculous conspiracy theories than it is real-time, reliable information (pqbnews.com being the exception, of course).
Air raid sirens? Fire trucks rolling though neighbourhoods with large-lunged men yelling into bullhorns? Perhaps the warning methods of 50 years ago are precisely the answers today.
— Editorial by John Harding
