The BC Liberals have shown they can be trusted about as far as they can be collectively thrown. Even for someone with experience throwing people in Jiu-jitsu, I find myself having a hard time trusting Premier Clark’s promise that if the HST is kept, it will be decreased to 11 percent, let alone 10 percent.

Something will come up, unforeseen expenses. It will endanger health care, or her family first agenda. No, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the tax cuts.

But I still support the HST.

As a small business owner & operator, the introduction of the HST was initially bad. I didn’t have to collect PST before, so the amount of tax I collected was substantially lower.

Due to inflation in general, and overall increases in operating costs, we generally have to increase our prices 1 to 2 percent a year. Now imagine, our prices jump 7 percent when the tax is implemented. Do we go up a further 1-2 percent that year leading to a potential increase of up to 9 percent increase in prices in one year.

A lot of small business live at the margin. We’re not rich, that’s for sure. We decided to eat the loss for the year. But I’m sure several business suffered for the increase. Now, if you’re paying your accountant less because you don’t have to collect PST and GST perhaps it breaks even – yeah right. But if you’re a small business where it’s your time, the question is if the times saving is worth the money lost.

Fortunately for us, we could afford to forgo raising prices that first year. But we still had to add on more tax, and while I don’t think we lost any clients due to the increase in price, there’s always people who seem to expect an increase in service level when they have to pay more. And when we’re getting none of that revenue, well, it’s hard to provide more for essentially less.

But I still support the HST.

Many of the points I would like to make are made much better by this video.

I think the embedded tax is something that a lot of people don’t understand, and it’s well explained in this video.

While I don’t know if the constant slamming of Bill Vander Zalm in the video is appropriate, it does show passion. Most of the passion in HST debate is clearly deposited on the anti-HST side. But most of the passion is misplaced. The problem is most of the pro-HST arguments are pushed by businesses and come across as condescending and if anything, they further fan the flames of opposition.

The fact is, people are pissed off with the BC Liberals over the implementation of the HST. And they have every right to. Whether we were directly lied to or not isn’t really important, we were clearly misled. Sometimes governments need to do unpopular things for the good of their citizens. But they should be up front about it.

How should we show our anger? Not by killing a tax that makes sense. It doesn’t matter if they really messed up the introduction, the HST is better than the previous tax structure, and the arguments for the PST are seriously flawed.

I support the HST. I just don’t support the BC Liberals. So I’ll be showing that in the way I vote:

A No vote for the abolishing of the HST and returning to the PST & GST… and a vote for anyone but the incumbent BC Liberals in the next provincial election.

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