By Doug Draper
So is this what you have to do to get Canada’s government to back down on implementing a harmonized sales tax? Threaten to “shut down” the country?
Apparently it is, according to a front-page story in the June 16 edition of The Globe and Mail. Obviously the fact that more than 70 per cent of the Ontario public is against the this tax – known more simply as the HST – doesn’t make an impression on our elected politicians in Toronto and Ottawa. They appear to have every intention of imposing it on the majority of the province’s residents this July 1 anyway.
But if a segment of the population – in this case, Ontario’s aboriginals – threatens to blockade roads and take other actions that could disrupt the G8 and G20 summits set to take place in Huntsville, Ont. and Toronto later this June, then all of a sudden the federal government is ready to negotiate an exemption for this regressive tax for that group.
According to this national newspaper, the federal government is now on the verge of extending an exemption to Ontario aboriginals on the much-hated HST due, in large part, to the threats aboriginal leaders have made to take actions that might turn the functioning of the summits into an international nightmare.
And how sad it is that any group has to make those kinds of threats to get a government to change its mind on a tax that will benefit big business interests (mostly international, and not our local, family owned businesses) at the expense of middle and lower-income consumers on everything from food and haircuts to the cost of our own funerals? All because the province’s premier, Dalton McGuinty, has lined up with Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, to reduce retail taxes for these big business interests, and couldn’t seem to care about shifting an ever greater regressive tax burden on the majority of us in the province.
If McGuinty is reading the same polls some of the rest of us are, he must know that well over two-thirds of all Ontario residents are against the HST. Yet he and his cabinet are stubbornly moving ahead with it anyway, as if the corporate business interests he is cowtailling are in charge of the province and democracy means nothing here.
Well maybe, we can get a little democracy back next year when we have a provincial election.
By the way, the citizens of British Columbia may be able to overturn having the HST imposed on them there due to legislation they have that says that if even 10 per cent of the people in every provincial riding signs a petition against a government action, it may go the way of the do-do bird. To date, about 15 per cent of the residents in each of those ridings has signed a petition against this regressive tax.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that legislation in Ontario but you can still sign an online peitition at http://www.ontariohst.ca .
(Click on Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary of interest and concern to residents in our greater binational Niagara region.)
Niagara At Large 
The government does what it wants with NO regard for us! They don’t even represent a majority of the population the way our electoral system is set up. My family has been in Canada for well over 200 years. So what’s the cut-off date for considering us “native” Canadians? I’m not aboriginal but SO WHAT! Why does the government always back down to aboriginals. They surely were mistreated and lied to in the past but now we can be lied to and cheated in the present in the same way but our exemptions just aren’t there. Maybe WE should blockade a few highways. How convenient the HST takes effect when the politicians are on their EXTENDED summer vacation so the furor can die down. I suppose they’ll spend their vacations by the artificial billion dollar lake created for the G8 and G20.
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Excellent article with excellent points. I am outraged over this HST. Government seems to do whatever they want. In spite of protests even by some of their own MPs, it falls on deaf ears. It would appear that showing up at the polls to vote actually means very little indeed! What the majority (or even minority in Stephen Harpers case) want, maters very little. Government will always do whatever they want anyway!
Until the people learn to stand up ‘en mass’ not much will change. Canadians would do well to learn from the First Nations.
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So much for “MAJORITY” governments
and even the Federal scene is warped out of proportion by the Liberals who support the Conservatives..Thus a Coalition in reality if not in form…
The Liberals in Saskachewan fought Tommy Douglas and NOW they are letting the Conservatives get away with blackmail in Ottawa.
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