Has everybody seen that show on Discovery Channel where the guy who does the truck commercial voice overs goes and does the worst jobs you can imagine for one day? You know, toilet crusher, camel rancher, sheep castrator, etc. Well I’ve got a new one for him; PR specialist for a new tax! Now that’s a job that makes you feel greasy real quick.

 

A few weeks ago the BC (and Ontario) governments rolled out their shiny (greasy?) new HST’s and if you’re reading this…the world has not ended. Actually as a veteran of two HST rollouts (Nova Scotia 2007) I feel fairly comfortable in declaring that the end of the world has not and will not hasten and Armageddon that may be coming our way.

 

Some of the loudest protests against this new-agey-sounding tax have come from my own near and dear restaurant business, the blog-o-sphere abounds with declarations that adding a 7 tax to people’s food bill (not their drink bill by the way) will erode demand enough to topple the mighty BC service industry.

 

Well let me declare something; not a chance in hell.

 

First of all sticker prices aren’t going up, few restaurants post their prices with tax included so from a customers point of view when choosing a restaurant, nothing changes. Secondly, the price of alcohol in restaurants is actually decreasing, the old system had a 10%pst plus 5%gst for a total of 15%, we’re now down to 12% so if you’re the kind of person who spends 25 bucks on a steak and 60 or 70 on a bottle of wine your dining experience will actually be cheaper. Finally, restaurants fail at such a high rate that any statistical increase in closures could be attributed to so many different forces that they become meaningless, especially in the economic roller coater of the last 18 months or so in this market. Yes, the HST may encourage a few joints over the edge, but they likely were hanging on by the thinnest of threads to begin with.

 

In the end it may be pointless to play devil’s advocate for the HST, as it may be useless to try to manage the public relations of rolling it out, there’s no way to make it sound good and it’s way more fun to complain about taxes then acknowledge that in a years time we’ll all have adjusted and all this hullabaloo will seem quite silly. You wouldn’t think that the government would even bother trying to make a new tax seem more pleasant, but then consider the name of this tax “Harmonised” Sales Tax. That seems like pretty high fallootin’ language for something as frumpy as a tax, where’d they get that word “harmonised” from anyway? Well, let me tell you my Western Canadian friends, 15 years ago when this idea was being force fed to us back in Atlantic Canada, it originally had a simpler name; Blended Sales Tax. Makes a little more sense right? That’s what it is, take a dash of PST and mix in a pinch of GST, fire up the old Harvest Gold Oster Blender and there you go Blended Sales Tax, BST, BS tax…ohhhh BS Tax, right. Yes folks, I’ve no idea which Liberal spin doctor slapped the ‘H’ in place of the “B” but they must’ve been an English major and they should be thanked for bringing harmony coast to coast. Finally.

 

Cheers

Ryan Cheverie – Brown-Froman: http://www.brown-forman.com/