HST Costs

What's the cost of the new HST on consumers? $2000 on a new home, $1600 on a $20,000 renovation, $10 on your monthly cable bill, $5 a month on your bare basics phone, $1.40 more on a $20 haircut, about 90 cents more on a $12 movie ticket.

Just about everything you buy will go up by 7% in BC and 8% in Ontario.

See this CBC video report from the National.

"Yet our province's Conservative MPs have run for the hills on the HST, saying it wasn't their idea. The local Liberal MP has become suddenly opposed after having supported the budget, and after Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff committed to keeping the HST if he wins the next election." - Denise Savoie op-ed inTimes Colonist

Harper will be bringing in legislation to allow the harmonization of the GST and PST sometime this fall or before March 2010. Liberal leader, Ignatieff has stated he would keep the tax change if he becomes Prime Minister. Layton, the federal NDP leader has stated he will vote against the new tax.

Check here for resources opposed to the new Tax.

h/t to Accidental Deliberations for Savoie link

Campbell ready to sell Liquor stores?

Here we go again. There is a crisis in BC and the Government is in deep doo doo. What an opportunity for a right wing government to sell off government assets and guess who is there to help them. The Vancouver Sun. Hey I'm not surprised. These folks are just not playing straight shooter on this issue.

BC has one of the most well run liquor distribution systems in the world. The profits go to the government to assist in paying for health-care, educations, building new roads, fixing old ones, replacing schools with newer ones etc.

Its a darn good bargain for the people of BC. Alberta went the other way a decade or more ago. They decided to sell off government liquor stores. It was good at first for price watching public as prices for everything fell. That lasted all of 15 minutes. Today Alberta is littered with little corner liquor shops, selling some things as a loss leader, but largely charging the same prices as BC or Saskatchewan.

The Alberta experiment has failed. It has only hurt the people that work in the liquor stores. These people use to make a decent wage, have a pension and security. Today they make minimum wage, no pension and no security. The profit in privatizing liquor stores went to people that could buy the license. The savings that were heralded from the roof tops for consumers never happened.

Today the profit from liquor sales goes to the owner of the store. Like always, the little guy loses. The little guy pays the price. Now look at what beer costs you.

Campbell's War on Sustainable Government

Part one

What the heck is going on in BC. Premier Gordon Campbell has pulled the wool over the eyes of the media and the public for eight plus years now.

Lets look at his record so far. He has run the largest three and by the time he is done, four deficits in BC history. He has accomplished this despite coming to office in 2001 with a one billion dollar surplus. Campbell talked about a structural deficit that lead to the huge deficit in 2002. What he did not mention was his move to slash taxes by very large numbers, to the extent that it crippled the government's ability to deliver on services to people, to maintain health-care and education funding.

This manufactured circumstance of lower revenues lead to the Campbell government claiming they had to reign in health care costs. He did this by gutting health care workers rights, reducing wages and benefits by 40 to 50 percent. It was one of the most aggressive attacks on workers benefits in Canadian history.

Cutting health care was not enough with shrinking revenues to balance the budget. Campbell had promised in the election not to raise tuition fees. He kept the promise for one year. The fees have risen every year since. BC went from having the second lowest tuition and post secondary fees in Canada to rivaling those in Alberta, Canada's highest cost education.

Further measures by the Campbell Government like cuts to the Corporate capital tax put another big hole on the revenue side of the ledger. This was a tax that applied to paid up capital in the province and was intended to address the companies that did big business in BC but had corporate head quarters else where. In the case of the banks, BC received nothing in income tax as they are all headquartered in Toronto. Ontario gained the income tax for banks on business done in all the other provinces, including BC.

Premier Dave Barrett was slaughtered in the 1975 election in part due to the Social Credit promise to eliminate the Capital tax. The tax survived and has been place at various levels since 1975, with governments of all stripes relying on it to support government services.

So Campbell managed in 2001 to lay the ground work of undermining the government's ability to fund health-care, education and other government services. This is the first step often employed by right wing governments in the USA and now Canada, to remove government's ability to support improvements to health-care and education.

If government can't support these issues then you pass it onto the individual. The liberals have systematically removed procedures from coverage on MSP. They have drastically reduced the financial support for seniors drug plans and for others.

MSP premiums are going up 6% this year. That's faster than US Health care cost increases! In future posts I will look at each of these items and add more with respect to taxation, or the lack of taxation and how the government agenda is one to privatize BC's public services like BC Hydro, BC Ferries, and the payoff of a big time liberal contributor with the sale of BC rail.