In this whole HST debate the one question that doesn’t seem to come up too often is this: What government in its right mind would give up its ability to collect its own taxes?
I mean, if the American federal government were to try to implement something like the HST south of the border, the individual states would start to scream bloody murder and probably a whole new civil war would break out.
Here, though, the provincial Liberals just quietly rolled over and handed one of their greatest powers, the right under law of a government to collect money from its citizens, without any fuss or debate, and rights once given away are very hard to get back.
Now I don’t want to get all Quebec here and start ranting about “sovereignty” this and “sovereignty” that, but it is important for B.C. to maintain its independence from Ottawa, especially in such an important financial matter like this.
I mean, sure, it is all goodness and light between the two levels of government right now, but it wasn’t that long ago that the federal government was withholding transfer payments from our health care system because they didn’t like how we were handling it, and what’s to keep them from turning around in the future and doing the same with the HST?
This whole thing seems to be a part of a pattern with the B.C. Liberals. When something gets too tough to deal with they fob it off on somebody else so that they can claim to have clean hands for the next election. They did it with B.C. Ferries and now they’ve done it with provincial taxes.
Well, no matter how it goes with this HST vote, they should remember for the next election that the Liberal Party in British Columbia has already been voted out of existence once already back in the 1950s, and if this situation reminds too many people of Brian Mulroney and the GST, Christy Clark and Kim Campbell could end up with all too much in common.
Jeff Taylor
Victoria
