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Nine hundred East Kootenay voters have signed the anti-HST petition to date – meaning organizers have reached their 15 per cent target.

According to the Fight HST Campaign in Kootenay East, over 900 signatures have been collected.

As The Free Press went to print there was no break down available of numbers across each community in the riding.

To be successful, the petition must gather signatures from 10 per cent of voters in each riding across B.C. by July 5.

The Liberal government could then be required to hold a referendum on its decision to link the seven per cent B.C. tax and five per cent federal tax into a single 12 per cent value added tax.

Petition canvasser Sharon Cross said: “There have only been a few people that have not really been interested. This is a huge issue that affects everybody in the province, and so far the results have been overwhelmingly positive.”

“What we are hearing from people is that they are angry with the government on this issue, since they stated they would not bring in the HST” said Cross.

Kootenay East MLA Bill Bennett told The Free Press this week: “I’m not surprised – I expected them to be able to find 10 per cent of the voters who would say no to a new tax.

“I think it is an important message that I personally need to think about and respect.

“I think the government and myself have to accept responsibility for the really poor job we have done in terms of announcing the tax and communicating its benefits to the province. I don’t think we’ve done a good job in that regard.”

“I get that people don’t like the new tax, I get that people don’t like the fact consumers will pay seven per cent on some items that wasn’t there before, and I respect that, but however we have brought in over 100 tax cuts in the last nine years, you will pay more tax anywhere else in the country except Alberta, and they aren’t so far from us anymore.”

• What questions do you have about the HST? We will pose them to local tax experts, the anti-HST canvassers and the provincial government on your behalf. Email questions to freepress@shawcable.com or call 250-423-4666.

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turds

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On July 1, the cost of becoming more productive and competitive will fall significantly in B.C. and Ontario, as the harmonized sales tax replaces the provincial sales tax.
The PST directly adds to the cost of machinery, equipment and the technology we need to invest in if our businesses are to become productive enough to survive in global market.

The new tax — the HST — can be deducted from the tax collected when the firm sells its final output.
Not only will this save our industries billions of dollars, but it will also go a long way to helping us deal with a strong dollar and improve our economy and our lives.
Canadians think we are at least as good as Americans, if not better. We are more polite than they are. We say please and thank you more often. We don’t carry arms. And Canadian citizens, if not always Canadian teams, play the best hockey.

There are also many similarities: We speak the same language as our U.S. neighbours, shop in similar malls, live in the same kinds of houses and hold the same kinds of jobs. Moving south of the 49th parallel is not nearly as big a change for Canadians as moving to Asia, Africa or even South America or Europe.
But there are some important areas where we are not keeping up with the Americans. In fact, now that our currency is at par, they are eating our lunch.
When Americans go to work, they turn out more goods and services each hour than do Canadians — they are more productive. American output per hour worked has been higher than Canadian productivity over the lifetimes of most Canadians.

And the difference is growing as U.S. productivity improves faster than ours. In the last quarter of 2009, Canadian productivity grew a mere 1.4 per cent, while the U.S. surged ahead 6.9 per cent.

Producing less means earning less, and this hurts our standard of living. As long as those who bought what we produced could pay in 65-cent dollars, we only noticed how poor we were when we traveled out of the country.

Now, with our dollar equal to the U.S.’s, our goods and services are more expensive to the rest of the world. We have trouble competing and lose export sales and jobs.
If we want a better life for ourselves and our children, we need to become more productive. But we don’t do that by toiling like slaves. Instead, we need the tools that enable us to generate more output for each hour worked.

I’m referring to the machinery, equipment and technology that increase output without increasing effort.
A recent report from Statistics Canada shows we are moving in the wrong direction. Instead of helping us stay competitive by adding machinery and equipment, Canada had a record level drop in this kind of investment during the last recession.

In the short run, this had a small benefit: Companies that were not spending on improving productivity could afford to keep more workers on and minimize unemployment.
In the long run, not investing in the tools that will increase productivity is like not giving your child needed medical treatment because it will hurt. Less productive companies may end up with all their workers becoming unemployed as they lose their customers to more productive producers.
There are many things we can do to improve our economy and our job base. We can undertake research and apply new, innovative ideas. We can add human capital, training workers at all levels.

But the fastest and most immediate thing we can do is to apply more of the machinery, equipment and technology that already exists. By reducing the cost of investment for companies, the HST will make it easier for us to do this.

Roslyn Kunin is director of the B.C. office(of the Canada West Foundation)
Trail Daily Times

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Truth-be-told, BP is equally as responsible as any Canadian Oil & Gas or mining company.

Fantastic Corporate Citizen’s trend not to be in the Oil & Gas or mining industries.

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girls

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for boys

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Ya, kinda like bad music – harmless, unless YOU have to listen to it.

Disrespectful owners of innocent dogs SUCK!

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Four out of five British Columbians in a recent survey expressed a willingness to sign the petition to repeal the harmonized sales tax. Many groups and opposition parties have cited deficiencies of the impending sales tax reform. But in failing to propose any alternative to the HST, they have accepted the notion that British Columbia’s existing retail sales tax is a relatively desirable tax.

After all their publicly bandied criticism of the HST — much of it misinformed and misconceived — opponents of this tax reform need to justify retention of the PST. It’s time for the public spotlight to be turned from the HST to the PST. In fact, B.C.’s PST is seriously flawed and economically damaging, and whatever its potential shortcomings, the HST will be superior in almost every respect.

A common adage is that "an old tax is a good tax." B.C.’s PST is not only an old tax but an antiquated and outmoded tax. The format is used in only five Canadian provinces (just three after Ontario and B.C. replace their sales taxes mid-year) and 45 of the 50 U.S. states. Almost every other country has long since abandoned retail sales taxes and adopted a value-added tax format like Canada’s GST.

Moreover, no country besides Canada simultaneously employs two such divergent forms of sales tax at the national and sub-national levels. Retention of the PST in B.C. would leave the province’s businesses with an unnecessary $150 million of tax compliance costs each year, which push up product prices for all consumers. Retaining the PST would also leave the provincial government burdened with annual costs of $30 million for administration plus $50 million for vendor compensation.

These operational costs will be eliminated with the move to an HST, thus helping to preserve public services and/or resist pressures for tax hikes. In addition, repealing the HST would deprive the B.C. treasury of $1.6 billion in federal transfers made to facilitate harmonization. Opponents of the HST have not told us how they would make up those lost revenues: raise taxes (and which ones) or cut public spending (and on which services)?

Even worse than these financial impacts of repealing the HST, keeping the PST would continue to act as a drag on B.C. economic prosperity. B.C. has one of the weakest records among Canadian provinces in growth of investment, productivity, and wages, which research studies link to the PST burden on businesses. Nearly 40 per cent of the $5 billion in annual PST revenues falls directly on business rather than consumers.

Non-partisan panels of economic experts have identified provincial retail sales taxes as one of the most damaging public policies in terms of productivity growth. In this context, harmonization’s estimated onetime impact on the consumer price level of 0.7 of one per cent will be a bargain in return for many years of increased growth in jobs and real wages. How many HST opponents would turn down this exchange if they understood it?

The existing PST imposes a heavier burden on the poor and near-poor than the impending HST with its companion refundable tax credits. For example, a childless couple with income of $30,000 (above the poverty line) will gain by a couple of hundred dollars per year after netting their HST tax credits against their slightly higher living costs.

In contrast, retaining the PST will continue to impose large but hidden tax burdens not only on the poor but on all consumers. The $1.9 billion in PST paid directly by businesses gets built into the competitive prices that they must charge consumers.

As a consequence of these embedded business taxes, products that are nominally tax-exempt under the PST actually bear positive effective tax rates. All goods and services now carrying a seven per cent rate of PST have effective tax rates exceeding seven per cent. With the shift to the HST, these embedded taxes will disappear through rebates to businesses for the taxes they pay on their inputs, so that B.C.’s tax rate will be a true and uniform seven per cent for consumers.

Apparently, HST opponents prefer to pay their taxes in hidden, covert ways rather than in the highly visible manner of a value-added tax. B.C.’s move to harmonize its sales tax with the federal GST provokes the same misunderstandings and opposition as arose with the 1991 shift of the hidden federal manufacturers’ sales tax to the highly visible GST.

By Jon Kesselman, Vancouver Sun

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Bolognese

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Dead Ringer

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I love the changing seasons. From Winter into Spring with new smells, colours and activities, and Summer with the warmth and sparkling streams, and Autumn when the colours begin to change to the yellows leaves with golden Larch needle beds and then full circle to Winter with a wonderful white cover to play in!

I love the local people who look me in the face with a warm smile and greet me where ever I venture, the understanding and care they have for my family, and the fun we share in our little town.

May family values and community thrive in Fernie.

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Those of us old enough to remember the introduction of the GST in 1991 can find a warm feeling of nostalgia in today’s political argument over its logical extension, the HST.
No wait, that’s not nostalgia. It’s nausea.

Then-prime minister Brian Mulroney’s “hated” GST was proposed to be nine per cent, then brought in at seven amid a storm of unfocused outrage. It was sure to destroy the country, or whatever was left of it after the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mulroney handed off to B.C.‚Äôs own Kim Campbell, too late. Jean Chr?©tien‚Äôs Liberals crushed the Progressive Conservatives in 1993, chiefly by promising to replace the GST with a better tax, or a fairer tax, or something. They floated an alternative, aptly named BST, but it was all just a show for the poor dumb folks.

Here’s how dumb Canada was, not even 20 years ago. The GST replaced a 14-per-cent manufacturers’ sales tax that was imposed on our own industries, but not on imports. Then we stood around in our dirt-glazed lumberjack shirts, Molson stubbies in hand, and wondered why were still hewing wood and drawing water for the world.

Now B.C. voters tell pollsters they’re going to give the Kim Campbell treatment to Gordon Campbell, and elect the NDP to keep taxes down. A radio station does person-in-the-street interviews. Two out of three people don’t know what the HST is. The third is against it.

Unlike Chr?©tien, NDP leader Carole James doesn‚Äôt promise to repeal the HST, at least not right away. We‚Äôre stuck with it for five years, she says. The best bet is to stop it now, even though the province can‚Äôt change a federal law.

NDP MLAs have awkwardly joined up with Bill Vander Zalm’s petition drive, in the great tradition of running to the front of the day’s parade. They did it with the carbon tax too. They’ve turned into a reactionary force, confronting a flood of B.C. Liberal innovations, with none of their own.

No one really knows what a successful petition would mean, although the best guess is, not much.

Vander Zalm doesn’t promote an NDP government. That would be a hill too far even for him. He made a career out of fighting Ottawa, over the GST, abortion and French on corn flakes boxes, and this is more of the same.

At anti-HST rallies around the province, Vander Zalm talks openly about a conspiracy to impose global government. Canada’s doing the HST, they’ll talk U.S. President Barack Obama into it, and the next thing you know we’ll be merged with the European Union and B.C.’s tax rate will be set not in Ottawa, but in Brussels.

Vander Zalm says the HST will once again till the soil for a third provincial party, presumably the B.C. Conservatives under his sidekick Chris Delaney. (Chris who? Never mind.)

In 1999, Vander Zalm ran for the fledgling Reform B.C. in a Delta South by-election and was trounced by Val Roddick. He entered politics in the 1970s claiming to be both a federal and provincial Liberal, presumably because that was the vehicle he found with the keys in it.

Here’s the central reason that B.C. in 2010 needs to move to a consumption tax. The baby boomers are retiring. There won’t be enough people paying income tax to support them. This is not a prediction. As the engineer aboard the Titanic said, it is a mathematical certainty.

You might want to check the rising water before you sign a petition.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press and BCLocalnews.com.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca

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The HST’s bitter pill might be good medicine

Until you live someplace, you can’t get a proper feel for her passions and proclivities.
So, naturally I started paying attention to the debate over the harmonized sales tax.
Coming from Alberta, I naturally sympathized with its opponents — taxes bad! Announced just after an election, when it needed to be discussed in advance, the timing wasn’t merely suspicious. It reeked. Still does.
But it didn’t take long to see the issue was more complicated.
B.C. politics "enjoy" a reputation as harsh and noisy, making it hard to discern mindless rhetoric from fair comment. Many of the HST’s detractors are ordinary people who think it’s a bad idea. Fair enough.
But many of the loudest are the types who think Premier Gordon Campbell lies when he orders lunch. That’s not a knock on the left — they have counterparts on the other side, just as shrill and stupid. It’s a knock on people who don’t know what they’re for, only who they hate.
Assuming the Liberals aren’t evil fat cats lighting cigars with $100 bills, but actually believe this is good policy, I wanted to hear their side. They must think it’s worth it to endure this, because they couldn’t have handled it worse.
If that’s the case, I should ask the smartest person I could find to explain it. So, I looked in the mirror.
Yes, I’m kidding. I asked a friend who can arrange such things who he would recommend. Would a Harvard MBA economist do? Uh … yeah. That would be fine.
Ralph Sultan, the first provincial politician I’ve met with a Harvard MBA, was good enough to call me and explain the benefits of the HST, slowly, using long words only when absolutely necessary. Sultan started by saying, basically, value-added taxes are the future. Most Western countries are moving this way, with the notable exception of the United States. Simpler and cheaper overall, they’re much loved by economists.
Currently, consumers are hit by several layers of provincial sales tax before the product or service appears in front of them, especially in sectors like manufacturing. This accumulates, driving the costs of business up. You’re paying those taxes now, you just aren’t seeing them.
The HST has the benefit of being visible. That I can appreciate.
I asked Sultan how British Columbians can be expected to support what is, to most, a bigger tax on more items.
"Let’s start with jobs," he said. No matter how much this isn’t fun to hear, the companies people work for have to do well, or they either fold or leave. Neither of those is good for the province, and the multi-tiered tax system makes B.C. less attractive to do business in.
Yes, the "annoyance factor" will be there. Some things will be more expensive. But the cost of business will go down, encouraging reinvestment in industries not doing well, such as forestry.
As someone who wasn’t here in the awful 1990s, but pointing and laughing from Alberta (now doing the same in reverse), I can appreciate that, too.
Policy aside, Sultan has been one of his own government’s harshest critics of the timing and delivery. He’s right — the delivery was borderline incompetent, and incomprehensibly slow to muster a response to the storm of opposition.
That doesn’t inspire confidence, which the Opposition MLAs have exploited. As they should.
Sultan made good points, I had to admit. I enjoyed the chance to pick his brain. Too often, we decry politicians for swaying with the polls and playing it safe.
Nothing is irreversible — the Liberals are clearly and openly gambling that by the next election, voters will have seen the benefits and calmed down.
The federal Liberals vowed to repeal the hated GST, but found it made too much sense to keep it. Sultan says it will be the same here — bitter pill, good medicine.
But man, was that timing ever horrible.

macleankay@shaw.ca

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West Fernie remains in the Regional District for now however the politicians are once again working on a annexation plan. The Golf Course is definitely in the City and should be included with the proposed ban.

Has anyone smelled burning hair?

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Young_local is a wealth of good information.

Keep those skid marks in your underwear and off the soccer fields!

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