TORONTO—As British Columbians stare down their provincial government in a prolonged game of chicken over the Harmonized Sales Tax, the question remains, why has a tax that caused such uproar in the west received just a whimper in Ontario.
That battle came to another turning point on Monday when B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell said that if a majority of people voted against the HST in a non-binding referendum September 2011, his government would scrap the controversial tax.
“If people decide they want to get rid of the HST next September then I guess we’ll get rid of the HST next September,” he told the Vancouver Sun in an interview on Monday.
“People have been very clear to me and to the government that they want to be included in a decision of this magnitude.”
That decision came after a legislative committee convened to debate how to respond to a petition against the new tax.
The province tried to avoid facing that referendum by denying the 700,000-signature-strong petition that called for it. That plan backfired after a B.C. Supreme court forced the Liberals to acknowledge it and choose between holding a referendum on the new tax or having the B.C. legislature vote on it one more time.
With Liberal backbenchers and others loath to again vote in favour of the maligned new tax, they chose to go ahead with a non-binding referendum.
But despite Campbell’s pledge to honour the results of that referendum, the decision not to hold a vote in the legislature outraged anti-HST forces that wanted the tax cancelled as soon as possible. They say the requirements of the referendum are unattainable—50 percent of registered voters in 85 percent of the ridings need to vote in support. Only 52 percent of registered voters cast their ballot in 2009 provincial election.
As a result, leaders of the HST opposition, former B.C. Social Credit Premier Bill Vander Zalm and Chris Delaney, deputy leader of the B.C. Conservatives, which hasn’t won a seat since 1975, are pushing plans to file recall petitions against Liberal cabinet members in their respective ridings.
But for all the action and contention in B.C., Ontario has seen little movement on the HST battle front. While the opposition Progressive Conservatives and NDP have vocally opposed the tax, there has been no grassroots campaign like the one in British Columbia and most Ontario voters have shrugged off the added expense as a politics-as-usual affair.
Why the difference? According to three university professors it comes down a combination of three factors: British Columbia’s political culture, legislation that gives voters the ability to force government referendums and recall elected officials, and the way the Liberals introduced the new tax.
That last explanation is what Simon Fraser University public policy professor Doug McArthur believes best explains the grassroots locomotive that is steaming down on the Liberals. He believes British Columbians’ outrage stems largely from the way the tax was implemented, coming immediately after a provincial election in which the Liberals campaigned in part on a promise they would do no such thing as introduce the tax.
McArthur says that anger may be compounded slightly further by the fact that the HST hit harder in B.C. because some things, including restaurant meals, were previously exempt from the PST, unlike in Ontario.
“I think the big anger is about the way it was done. There is a very deep-felt feeling that the government should have told voters, prior to and during the election that was held just before [the HST] was introduced, about what they were going to do and that they were considering this," said McArthur.
With such a major policy decision coming just two months after the May 2009 election, many doubt the government’s claim that the tax was not on their radar before or during the election. That position was further cast into doubt after freedom of information requests filed by CBC news and other media revealed government bureaucrats and the province’s Finance Minister, Colin Hansen, had been briefed on the issue from their federal counterparts well before the elections.
But McArthur also believes B.C.’s often populist political culture leads people to mistrust the government more and respond with dramatic changes in voting behaviour when a party falls out of favour.
