If you have ever wanted or desired to own your own brand new home, then the dream has been made much more difficult.
How would you like to be told that if you want to own a $400,000 to $800,000 house you will have to save an additional one to five more years for the privilege?
Before you say, “Oh, that is a rich person’s problem,” think again. Alberta home buyers and families from other provinces stimulate our local home building economy. If they do not buy, then our population shrinks and many local jobs are lost. A stimulated home buying economy is our problem! Each and every one of us will be paying substantially for this tax grab.
Have you heard the ads on the radio etc. that say if you vote “No” we will lower taxes from 12% to 10%? Well that is like the school bully stealing your lunch money and offering you a tip back for not making any noise about it. The bully takes $1.20 of your lunch money and then that same bully has the audacity to give you 20 cents back thinking everything is OK.
The second strategy employed to deceive you is to divide the different industries and play them against each other in an attempt to grab your “No” vote.
One hears that the forestry industry benefits from the HST. Let’s just think about that for a minute. If new housing starts are down, demand for lumber drops then where is the forestry industry going to sell its finished lumber? Forestry needs the building industry to thrive. Did you know that the residential construction industry contributes 10% to our Gross Domestic Product? Now we have to add in commercial, industrial and institutional construction, which increases our GDP to an even greater percentage. Last year the entire construction industry contributed $74 billion to the GDP. That means a large percentage of our jobs rely on construction.
Overall construction materials and labour rates have jumped to compensate for HST. The distribution of goods and services through the supply chain also has a negative accumulative cost to doing business. There are unseen HST costs that accumulate and are not recovered. Many other small support services for business in this country are now being hit and costs are being passed on to varying degrees.
In my opinion the fear mongering tactics of the government’s campaign to generate more money to support our society is effective but off target. There will never be a government asking for less money, but always asking for more money.
The bottom line is this; the HST will forever impair your ability to own a new home in B.C. You have the power with your vote to ensure this does not happen. Vote YES to extinguish the HST.
Paul Dabbs
Parksville
