Government by the corporations, for the corporations

New tax shows that politicians just don't get it

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
London Free Press
2nd December 2009, 3:39am

The July 1 imposition of an unwanted Harmonized Sales Tax on millions of Canadians, which took another step forward on Parliament Hill yesterday, is a symbol of a growing malaise in Canadian politics.

It's the increasing disconnection of Canada's political elite, both in the nation's capital and in the provinces, regardless of whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, from the people they are supposed to serve.

This time the victims are millions of British Columbians and Ontarians, whose respective Liberal provincial governments -- aided and abetted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's federal Conservatives -- are imposing on them a new, unwanted and hated Harmonized Sales Tax in the middle of a struggling, jobless recovery. A tax that neither B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell nor Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty campaigned on in their last provincial elections.

A tax Campbell said he would not impose. As for McGuinty, he has broken his 2003 election promise not to raise taxes so many times, a beleaguered and broke Ontario public responds with derisive laughter every time anyone mentions his repeatedly shattered pledge today.

In Ottawa, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff -- a man who has simultaneously praised the oil sands in Alberta, while advocating in Ottawa greenhouse gas emissions cuts that would gut them -- ended months of coming down on all sides of the HST by declaring, long after it even mattered, the Liberals would support Harper's enabling legislation.

By the time Ignatieff finally figured out the official Liberal position, the Bloc already had decided to back Harper, making Liberal support unnecessary and leaving the NDP, both federally and provincially in B.C. and Ontario, the only party consistently opposed to the tax. (In Ontario, the Conservatives have split with their federal cousins to oppose the HST.)

To add insult to injury, all federal taxpayers will now be conscripted into paying $5.9 billion to the governments of B.C. and Ontario, so they can impose a 12% HST in B.C. and a 13% HST in Ontario, that the majority of citizens in both provinces don't want. Let's just call this what it is -- taxation without representation -- with the Conservative Harper and the Liberals' Campbell and McGuinty sharing the blame. Liberal, Tory? Same old story.