I went to a policy discussion about ‘HST’ (Harmonized Sales Tax) tonight. I was excited to see a panel of former senior politicians, all of whom were from left-wing parties, speak in a right-wing environment. The night was a success because I left with more insight than I started with. But it was a failure in that it was all based on the assumption that HST was a good thing.
Now, I’m not an economist, and perhaps I was in a room of economists and just didn’t know it. Throughout the evening panelists talked about the political battle that is fought when implementing a smart strategy like HST. But even though this event took place in Alberta, the only province without a PST in Canada, there was no tools distributed to start discussions around why we should introduce HST here.
In all fairness, a former finance minister did say that the HST needs to be introduced to achieve a better ‘tax mix’, potentially reducing the level of corporate and personal income tax balanced against more consumption taxes (like HST). Another panelist suggested that municipalities should be allowed to directly tax citizens through a consumption tax. All nice ideas, but without a why they seemed like empty sales pitches… or dare I say empty political promises.
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