I do some freelance work for a newspaper in Northern Ontario. Occasionally in the past year, I've written the editorials. Here's one that I wrote for that very paper about the new Harmonized Sales Tax in Ontario that I did not submit:
The news that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty will harmonize the PST with the federally collected GST has been met in Queen’s Park with a certain amount of outrage by opposition MPPs and anti-poverty groups.
And who can blame them for their concerns?
The new harmonized sales tax will mean an increase in the costs of a wide variety of items that had previously been excluded from the provincial tax scheme, precisely because not taxing them was a benefit to those most at risk in our society.
Mr. McGuinty’s new tax scheme will likely see an increase in the prices of home heating, gasoline at the pumps, new homes, and veterinary care.
Advocacy groups for Ontario’s marginalized communities have read the writing on the wall and see this as a government policy that will hit the poorest the hardest--particularly single parents.
And while Mr. McGuinty has assured these groups that programs will be in place to help Ontario’s lowest earners, the HST’s critics, like newly crowned Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath, are right to be skeptical.
Previous governments, both federally and provincially, have balanced their budgets over the past 10 years largely on the backs of the very social programs that they have claimed were available to help the poor.
For years advocacy groups have been pleading for Employment Insurance reform on the federal level, claiming that the system was not there for those who need it, only to be met with silence.
Only since the global recession has impacted the until-now middle classes have people come to realize that these groups were right all along.
But why does it take a group of autoworkers in Oakville or miners in Sudbury to get laid off before anyone listens to anti-poverty activists? They’ve been living with these realities for a long time.
So when these same activists cry foul over the harmonized sales tax, the rest of us should listen.
One of the first things Mr. McGuinty did to save money after coming to power was to delist optometry care from OHIP--a move that undoubtedly had a massive impact on the poor in Ontario.
Now, early on in his 2nd--and hopefully last--term as Ontario’s premier, he has asked the same people to swallow tax increases on necessary items.
While the government needs to raise higher tax revenues, Mr. McGuinty should have the courage to collect those taxes from the already under-taxed top 10% of the province’s income bracket, where the personal impact will not be felt as hard.
