Mail in voting to keep or extingush the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) in British Columbia has begun.
For the last few years, Bill Vander Zalm and Chris Delaney have assisted the BC NDP in spreading untruths about the tax. Folks like tax lawyer David Robertson and “lawyer student” Chris Thompson from Fight Fight HST video fame have worked hard to counter the “truthiness” claims of Vander Zalm and company.
The anti-HST folks like to claim the HST will raise prices, is unfair to lower wage earners, etc.
However a memo from the Canadian Auto Workers Union’s Economist and Director of Economic, Social, & Sectoral Policy, Jim Stanford says the OPPOSITE of what other unions, Vander Zalm and the BC NDP have been saying.
Take a look at page two of Stanford’s letter:
• Political opposition to the HST does not reflect a well considered call for a fairer tax system. It’s more about electoral gamesmanship by opposition parties eager to damage the current government. When the anti-HST coalition tries to tap into knee-jerk anti-tax sentiments to win more votes, it also encourages a regressive, potentially dangerous attitude to government and the public services those taxes support. We’ll pay dearly for that kind of attitude in coming years. Progressive forces will face an intense and challenging battle to preserve public services against budget cuts, fighting back against right-wing forces that want to downsize public services and programs in the face of current budget deficits.
• The anti-HST campaign, by fanning the flames of “tax rage” among Ontarians, will likely undermine the coming fight to preserve public programs and services services most of us use routinely such as health care, child care and education, as well as other programs that unemployed coworkers and family members are accessing for the first time.
• Given these factors, I do not recommend that CAW locals, retired worker chapters, or activists participate in the various anti-HST activities which will be organized by the opposition parties in coming months. In preparing this letter, I have consulted with the members of the CAW’s National Executive Board, with public sector union leaders, with progressive tax and social policy experts, and with my colleagues in the CAW Research department. Most share my concern that the anti-HST campaign, by tapping into a conservative anti-tax sentiment, risks doing significant damage to our social programs (and the tax base for those programs).
After David Robertson shared part of an email from Stanford on CKNW last week, Stanford apparently took Mr. Robertson to task for disclosing the details in that email. Particularly where Stanford wrote, HST “should be no-brainers, but which get held up solely because of the politics.”
Listen to Mr. Robertson’s interview here:
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Odd that Stanford would be upset with Mr. Robertson sharing the truth.
In fairness, Stanford wrote on page 3 of his letter “…the B.C. situation requires a separate analysis”. But on page 6 he states:
Four other provinces (Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland) also collect their sales taxes through the HST system. In those provinces there has been no measurable negative impact on consumers or the fairness of the tax system, resulting from the replacement of the previous PST with the new HST.
Then on page 10 Standford documents what is true of the HST regardless of Province:
All sales taxes (unlike income taxes) depend on your spending, not your income, and hence they impose a higher proportional burden on low-income individuals. But this is true of all sales taxes (including the existing PST and the new HST). Shifting from one sales tax (cascading [PST]) to another (value-added [HST]) has no significant distributional effect.
ADDED JULY 6, 2011:
Listen to Jim Stanford’s CKNW radio interview from July 6 here:
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Interesting to note the memo has mysteriously disappeared from the the CAW website.
But you can read it in all its glory below:
Hst Stanford 2009
I find the way that the vote is worded to be very confusing, and I’m left wondering if there’s an attempt being made to deliberately confuse the issue. Instead of using the complicated like “extinguish the HST,” something simpler like the following voting options should have been used instead:
- YES to HST (keep the HST)
- NO to HST (return to PST and GST)
There were many PST-exempt items in the past, and now we’re all seeing a much higher amount of taxes being paid since the HST, which is 5% GST plus 7% PST, is applied to pretty much everything across the board at a flat 12%, even if HST does get reduced a few percentage points we’ll still all be paying more taxes overall because the PST exempt goods and services will still be at the higher rate.
I also view the current Clark government’s offer to pay people a small amount of money if the vote results in keeping the HST as nothing more than a bribe. Isn’t bribery illegal in Canada, especially when used for the purpose of influencing a vote?
I’m disappointed at Elections BC for allowing this vote to be worded in the manner that it was, and also for not objecting publicly to this Clark government’s offer to pay people if the HST doesn’t get voted out. When Elections BC insisted previously that a vote should take place, and they didn’t back down to Gordon Campbell’s posturing, I felt that Elections BC was doing the right thing and I was very happy with that — how come they’re not standing up for “what’s right” now?