BC Business
BC-Liberals-HST_5.jpgThe HST might be the right medicine for B.C., but the side effects are proving deadly.
The BC Liberals had a chance – and failed – to play it straight with the HST. Imagine Christmas was an impacted wisdom tooth and Santa Claus was a dentist, and you’ll have some idea of how much Premier Campbell is looking forward to the BC Liberal convention Nov. 19 and 20. Gone are the yearly festivals of backslapping and smug self-congratulation. This one will be grim.?
Imagine Christmas was an impacted wisdom tooth and Santa Claus was a dentist, and you’ll have some idea of how much Premier Campbell is looking forward to the BC Liberal convention Nov. 19 and 20. Gone are the yearly festivals of backslapping and smug self-congratulation. This one will be grim.
The HST has been such an epic political disaster it could have been forecast by Nostradamus. And yet it does not involve corruption or scandal, the usual elements that give a controversy legs. In fact, the scandal involves the implementation of a policy that is looked on by many if not most analysts as a worthwhile and even necessary step. But only because analysts don’t need votes. The fact that the government is now pulling up a chair at every restaurant meal, leaving teeth marks in your burger and eating seven per cent of your fries, is political poison for the Liberals, and a five-figure addition to every new-home purchase is the kind of thing that turns sensible folk into little Sarah Palins.
But it’s not the sales tax. It’s the sales job. There wasn’t one. The Campbell Liberals had the chance to play straight in the 2009 election campaign and at least broach the possibility of the HST, keep their options open. They didn’t. A word to Liberal backbenchers: barring recall, it might be a good idea to spend the next 2½ years stealing office supplies. At this point, you’ve got nothing to lose.
Unlike his skirt-chasing successor, Bill Clinton, the first president Bush managed to keep his trousers zipped. Unlike his bumbling, dissembling son, he did not botch his invasion of Iraq. And yet unlike those other presidents, Bush the First lasted only one term. That is largely because he was elected on the slogan, Read My Lips – No New Taxes. When new taxes followed, the Bush White House was toast. The man who defeated Saddam’s Republican Guard was defeated by angry Republican voters back home. Cue the moving vans.
In 1975 Pierre Trudeau brought in wage and price controls, having campaigned against them. It didn’t hurt his chances of dating Barbra Streisand. But he did lose the next election.
The HST is not an ideological issue. Unlike Prime Minister Harper’s recent census controversy, there are no senior bureaucrats howling that the government is charging blindly into quicksand. But just as the census affair played to public fears that Harper is an ideologue with a secret agenda, the HST imbroglio plays into public perceptions of our premier as a politically slippery character. The HST issue would have been trouble even if the Campbell government had been straight about it. It’s a disaster because it wasn’t.
Next year’s referendum is the Liberals’ Hail Mary pass. If HST opponents win, it may ease public anger. But axing the tax could help the NDP too; it would save them from a potentially sticky problem. The anti-HST battle makes an uneasy fit with NDP ideals. Tax revolts are much better suited to the likes of Bill Vander Zalm. Left in place, the HST might have been a difficult policy for the NDP to roll back; they might have tweaked it a bit rather than cancel it entirely. And imagine the anger that would generate. Could Carole James and company really afford to let it stand, even with revisions? More importantly, could the NDP be upfront about it? Could they say during the next election, “We don’t like the HST, but we won’t completely scrap it either?”
Lies can blow up in a politician’s face. But veteran politicians know that the truth can be just as bad. I guess that’s why they lie so much. At least that way you get a crack at those free office supplies for a few years.