It's been two months plus three days since the harmonized sales tax (HST) came into effect in B.C. That's about the only thing here that is clear sort of. There were those incidents of businesses mistakenly charging HST before they were supposed to, and we did pay HST on services that were set to be performed after July 1.
Throughout the summer we watched as signatures accumulated on former Premier Bill Vander Zalm and his Fight HST group's petition to force either anti-HST legislation to be introduced or a referendum to be held. The legislation for citizens' initiative petitions is so complex, rarely-used and never-before-successful that political scientists had a hard time explaining how it works, even as, one by one, ridings were hitting the 10 per cent threshold required. I never knew it existed until I started to report on it.
Then came the legal challenges that had journalists struggling to find law experts who could explain the arguments of the court cases. Some were brave enough to admit they did not.
Now, government documents obtained by Lower Mainland media sources have largely confirmed what New Democrat MLAs and the public have been saying since the tax policy change was quickly ushered in shortly after the 2009 election - that the Liberals knew full well this was on the agenda, but no one chose to mention it during the campaign.
So don't feel bad if you've had to pretend to understand all the elements of the HST saga a little bit more than you do when discussing it with chums in the coffee shop. The complexities of formation and implementation of tax policy and obscure legal challenges to obscure petition legislation have forced much of the discussion into the terms of how the HST has affected us personally.
I'm not going to put on the page whether I am for, against or ambivalent to the HST, because, as you can see, it's a complicated business. It was sold, or rather, rationalized to us by Finance Minister Colin Hansen as "the single biggest thing" the government could do to stimulate the B.C. economy. The economists and tax experts the government consulted said it would probably be five years before the benefits are fully realized - if at all. Sounds good. Can't wait to see if it's true, and I maintain high hopes, but personally, I am feeling it now. I have noticed a number of products that don't have HST added on have gone up in price because the product manufacturers are now having to pay HST on various parts of the production costs that they didn't have to before, and that cost is now being passed on us. I don't remember being warned of that. In fact, that flies in the face of the "savings" that were supposedly going to be passed along to me.
We've got some spectacular political theatre on the horizon as we wait to see how a legislative committee is going to deal with Vander Zalm's petition, and then, if needed, whether Vander Zalm is going to defy the odds again by taking down pro-HST MLAs with recall initiatives.
My own humble attempt at distilling the whole HST fiasco boils down to this: the government needs money. Corporate tax rates have been on a steady decline in the name of staying competitive, and the cost of government isn't going down. Shifting more of the tax burden onto average British Columbians is the strategy the government has taken. It may work. It may not. And in the meantime, journalists will keep political scientists, legal experts and their local MLA on speed dial in hopes someone, somewhere, somehow can help us all understand.
