Government HST is Sham When it Says its Creating Jobs in Ontario

In the Province of Ontario the provincial governments recently harmonized the Federal GST at 5% with the Provincial tax of 8 % for a total tax of 13% on all goods and services except for those few products which are restricted to GST only.
The rationale was that this tax would replace a manufacturer’s tax and provide business owners with the added cash flow from the manufacturer’s tax to create a significant amount of new jobs.

At the time I was thinking how can a new tax create a new job? The only way that can happen is if the government stimulates the job through government training or through some other method since the amount of money paid to the manufacturer is marginal compared to the costs.

One of the things the HST has stimulated and it sure as heck is not a lot of new jobs is the price of gas and the cost of electricity and heating oil. In the past heating oil and electricity two main stays of industry were not taxed. The price of gas was below the cost of gas in the United States.

Now with the combined HST, on top of a federal and provincial tax, gasoline shot up above the psychological $1.00 a litre price and is now $1.12 -1.15 giving the oil companies carte blanche to raise their prices without any consumer backlash. Higher gas prices are seen as the impact of the HST. Electricity in Ontario has gone through the roof and prices have increased also because of the impact of the HST.
Disposable income has also decreased. For example, since the consumer now has to pay as heat, hydro and fuel costs, that’s a $.20 cent per litre increase or $10.00 per tank of gas does not go into other products, just into the pockets of the oil companies and the tax man.

Take that same $10.00 and multiply that by the number of vehicles registered in Ontario of 10.5 million filling their tank once a week and that’s $100,000,000 million that is not spent by the consumer and again goes to just two sources, the government and the oil companies.

Are you getting my point? Taxes don’t create jobs. Companies and businesses do. Companies and businesses can only create jobs when they sell products. By cutting down on the consumers disposable income, less goods and services are acquired. With less goods and services purchased, less jobs.

So I think that government meddling and taxes are partly responsible for this mess we are in in both Canada and the U.S. Give someone $10,000 more per year and they are going to go out and buy new products and stimulate the economy. Somehow we have it all wrong in this country where jobs are limited due to high taxes and politicians with little or no business sense. Now .. where are those new jobs the HST was supposed to create.

Kensel Tracy is the Marketing Coach and a Senior Partner with the Corporate Coachworkz Inc. located in Chelsea Quebec and Ottawa Ontario, and also the President of Business Over Breakfast Clubs of North America. If you have a story of interest please contact him at kenselt@sympatico.ca.

Here are Awards for Government Waste by Jane Taber

Here is a great article by Jane Taber, Hill Columnist for the Canada's National Daily the Globe and Mail. The best thing about Jane's article is that it gives an overview of the issues that our government is facing when it comes to waisting taxpayers money.

Once again we passive Canadians just stand here and take this kind of thing. When someone wants to cut government spending, the NDP ( who only know how to spend) get up in arms, the Liberals ( who always spend no matter what) say that we are attacking the public service and the Bloc ( they always spend our money because its from Canada and so what) are waisted funds anyway, because we invest in these guys so they can take Quebec out of Canada. ( What a concept, try explaining that to the new democracy in Iraq)

Without with with out further adieu, Jane Taber. The Weatherall Awards


MP pensions and junk mail top waste awards
Jane Taber

The award-ceremony season could not go by without the Teddy waste honours. And this morning, dressed in black tie, the Prairie director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Colin Craig, announced the best of the worst government waste. He was accompanied by a person dressed in a pink pig costume – Porky the Waste Hater – and hostess and ceremony assistant, Natasha.

So without further ado, the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Teddy for 2010 is the “Gold-plated MP Pension.”

The CTF is always after the MPs and their generous pension plans that it says is “quite possibly the richest pension plan in the country.”

MPs are eligible for a minimum pension of $46,000 after just 10 years of service. “Oddly enough it is the only government program that all parties in Ottawa seem to agree on,” said Mr. Craig.

The Federal Teddy Award for 2010 goes to “MP Junk Mail.”

“The federal mail-out program allows MPs to send flyers to no more than 10 per cent of the households of any riding in the country,” the CTF says.

The group notes that the flyers have increased in cost from $5.9-million in 2005/06 to $10-million in 2008/09. “The more our government went into debt the more these things were sent out,” Mr. Craig aid.

This is the 12th annual Teddy awards, which are named after former bureaucrat Ted Weatherill who was fired from government in 1998 for claiming $150,000 in meal expenses over eight years.

There were others considered for the 2010 honours. Here are some of the better of the worst of federal government waste:

» $1.5 million for unused hotel rooms at the Francophonie Summit in Quebec City;

» the Public Works officials who sold the Queen’s silver by mistake (they sold it for $4000 and then spent $100,000 to get it back);

» and the $1.4-million spent by the Royal Canadian Mint to figure out that $20-million worth of missing gold was not missing at all.