Vote Yes to Extinguish the HST?
I recently drove from Vernon to Summerland and couldn’t help but notice the number of signs on the roadway promoting this thought. The appeal this message has is that it implies we are voting for less taxes, and who wouldn’t want that? Unfortunately, that isn’t really our choice. We can either vote to keep the bureaucracy duplication of two tax collection groups associated with the PST and GST separately or we can vote for their being combined into one.
The government’s need for money will not be diminished if we vote down the HST. In fact it will go up as the province will have to pay back the feds for reneging on this agreement.
The government’s imagination on how to get more tax revenue is endless – the property transfer tax, sales taxes on used goods, government-run lotteries, the environmental fuel tax are all examples of fairly recent schemes that do just that.
Hopefully the majority of us will realize when we cast our vote that this is not a vote on political reform to consider how much government spends or on what programs. It really is about less bureaucracy in how they collect it, and something they can tweak e.g. reduce it to 11 and then 10 per cent in the future to address the unintended consequences.
I will be voting No to keep the HST and reduce this government waste.
Myron Hocevar, Vernon
