For those of you playing along with the home game, the results of the HST referendum will be announced tomorrow.
Yes or no, I can only hope that our provincial government and governments in general will at least pay attention to this one fact of the referendum: treating the general public like children is not the best policy.
The folk in Ontario are scratching their heads wondering what the heck all the fuss is about out here. They have the HST, what’s the difference? Basically, their provincial government said there’s gonna be a change in the taxation system, this is what it is and this is why it is a good thing.
The BC government said, oh crap…look, let’s keep the discussions about it at the civil service level so we can have ‘plausable deniability’ when anyone asks us about rumours of a new tax. And deny it they did, all through the months leading up to the election. After the election, they said ‘wow, would you look at this, our financial people have
come up with this great new tax that will harmonize provincial and federal taxes. Harmony…we like harmony out here, right?’…no, no, we knew nothing about it, did we guys…
And then they put it into effect with very little information for us or for businesses having to implement it. There was no information about what services and goods would now have an additional tax because they were exempt from provincial tax under the previous system. If anyone in BC wanted more information about it, the website to go to was the one the ONTARIO goverment had put up for the information of their population.
And that is why the Ontario government didn’t face a mob of disgruntled, pitch-fork carrying folk screaming for their blood. Well, we are a little more mellow than that but, in our own laid back, west-coast way, we brought about the resignation of a premier who had just won his 3rd term (with the hammer of a majority of seats) a year later and forced the replacement premier to face the first referendum generated by popular petition, not sponsored by a sitting member of the legislature or arising from the legislative assembly.
It is definitely a first in this province and may well be a first in the country. I haven’t done that research but, if nothing else, it is a fine lesson for any government on the care and feeding of voters.
Here’s a timeline from the CBC website that nicely sums up the situation to date:
And just because I love it, the NDP Christy Crunch ad:
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