Re: Mental energy

On Thu, 9 Jun 2011, The Voice Of Objective Truth wrote:
> Ontario HST is 13%, but we have more exemptions on the 8% provincial 
> portion than BC.

See, now, the "exemptions" thing is just weird.  I look at my grocery bill 
and I see that some items have the 12% HST, but then I see that a few 
items have the 5% "HST".  Why not just keep the GST and PST and apply the 
PST to a lot more things?

Then again, I still remember how shocked I was when I visited Ontario in 
1985 and discovered that y'all charged PST for fast food over there.  We 
didn't in BC, but when GST came along a few years later and the feds began 
taxing fast food too, I figured it was because Ontario had set the 
precedent.  So I've sometimes wondered if implementing the HST was less of 
a big deal in Ontario because you applied the PST to more things anyway, 
meaning you were already paying 13% for more things anyway.

And oh, how fascinating, when I visited an A&A Records store in Calgary or 
Edmonton back in 1988 (towards the end of that year I spent at a Bible 
school in Saskatchewan) and realized that *none* of the music there had 
any tax on it -- because Alberta doesn't have PST at all.  (And, of 
course, at the time, the GST hadn't been invented yet.)

> Overall, I'd say the implementation was better in Ontario than in BC, 
> including what things to exclude and first year rebates.

Here in BC, there was also a huge, huge kerfuffle over it because it was 
felt that our premier had sprung the HST on us without any warning; in 
fact, if I'm not mistaken, in the most recent election (only a year or so 
before the HST was introduced), he had said the HST wasn't on the table. 
So he ended up resigning, and now we have a new premier, and fairly soon 
we'll have a referendum on whether or not to repeal the HST ... but it's 
going to confuse many people, because a "Yes" vote on the referendum does 
*not* mean "Yes to HST", it means "Yes to *repealing* HST", etc.  They 
might as well have us use a butterfly ballot or something.

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