Liberals cut off HST debate

Photo by Sam Leung

The BC Liberal arrogance reaches epic proportions.

by Adrian MacNair.

The anti-HST petition campaign may have reached a ridiculous 145,000 of the estimated 300,000 signatures required to force a referendum on the issue, but that’s not influencing the BC Liberal decision to cram the tax down the throats of the province anyway. The fact that the tidal wave of support to stop the HST has almost reached the halfway mark just 21 days days into a 3 month campaign is a pretty blatant indication that Gordon Campbell’s “surprise” tax is about as welcome as a KKK member at an NAACP meeting.

The BC Liberal government voted this evening to force an end to the debate on a bill required to make way for the despised HST. Government house leader Mike de Jong introduced a motion to have the “Consumption Tax Rebate and Transition Act” — a preposterous name the Liberals invented to cover the unpopularity of the name “HST” — pass by the end of the day on Thursday.

“Unless we get on with voting on this bill the PST remains a reality and people would be subject to not just the HST but the PST,” Mr.de Jong told reporters Monday night.

Well, yeah. That’s the whole point of the petition. Nobody wants the tax but the BC Liberals who are using their House majority to force it through.

The BC Legislature was inflamed today with anger and rhetoric as the NDP attempt to drag out the inevitable end of a month-long “debate” over the HST that has not deterred the Liberals one iota.

Opinion polls show that four out of five people in British Columbia oppose the tax, and the issue has turned the current polling heavily in favour of the NDP. And while the current BC Liberals may be standing behind Gordon Campbell’s vote-losing tax based on the principle of “stand united or hang separately”, former members of the Party have no interest in joining them on the gallows.

Former Finance Minister Carole Taylor spoke out against the HST recently, referring to the tax shift as “ideological”:

“This particular tax takes the tax off of business — it takes $1.8 billion off business — and puts it on consumers,” she is reported as saying.

“But I think the bigger issue is that just before the election he [Gordon Campbell] promised that they would not — they would not — do the harmonization of the sales tax. And then right after the election decided to do it.”

That really is the bigger issue. The Liberals can argue the benefits until they’re blue in the face, or hanging on the end of the rope if you will, but it doesn’t change the fact that this issue was never discussed in the election last May, except in conjunction with denial that it was an option at all.

The arrogance of the Liberals going ahead against all opposition to the HST, ignoring the current petition to its implementation, invites the kind of hubris not seen since voters delivered Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservative Party a pair of Seats in the House of Commons in 1993.

We keep hearing the same excuses on why we should put up with the constant Liberal arrogance and selfishness: the NDP would be devastating to British Columbia. Well, there’s a simple answer to that. If the Liberals didn’t make it so difficult to support the government by enacting taxes nobody wants, we wouldn’t need to consider the alternatives. But, as the expression goes, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Nobody shot and hung that albatross around Gordon Campbell’s neck. He did it to himself, and now he’s going to have to carry it with the full knowledge that every step he takes in the direction of the HST is a step his party is taking into its own grave.

Adrian Macnair is a Vancouver writer and blogger.