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British Columbia's HST fiasco

Did Finance Minister Kevin Falcon or any of the Liberals learn anything from the HST referendum?

Premier Christy Clark promised that the referendum would take place just like a normal election, but she then allowed third-party advertisements without disclosure. We'll never know how many millions were spent on trying to convince people to vote for the HST, but we know the government spent $7 million. It wasn't just the advertising campaign that failed any reasonable test of transparency; information provided by the government and its "independent panel" couldn't be verified. One of the lessons the Liberals should learn from their HST failure is that transparency is essential in order to earn public trust.

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Kevin Falcon HST gordon campbell christy clark british columbia anti-HST

The real impact of HST's defeat on provincial finances

By Iglika Ivanova
| September 12, 2011

On Sept 8, Finance Minister Kevin Falcon released a much anticipated update on provincial finances.

The Minister's presentation focused on highlighting the cost of the move back to PST/GST, providing some large numbers for the media headlines, instead of looking at the big picture.

In case you missed the media coverage, the provincial coffers are projected to suffer a loss of $2.8 billion over the next three years, relative to the estimates presented in February's Budget 2011. The Ministry estimates that $2.3 billion of the loss is brought about by the HST defeat and the move back to the PST/GST system.

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B.C.'s regressive tax shift

By Marc Lee
| June 28, 2011

With much of the talk on taxes in B.C. about the HST, we issued a new report today that looks at the bigger context for B.C.'s tax system (Vancouver Sun op ed here, CTV News story here). Iglika Ivanova, Seth Klein and I compare and contrast B.C.'s tax system after a decade where tax cuts were touted as the solution to every problem.

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