Just because you haven’t heard much about the Harmonized Sales Tax over the last few weeks doesn’t mean the Ontario government has stopped its plan to merge the PST and GST. Today, McGuinty’s Liberals tabled the HST legislation. The Conservatives will no doubt put up a fight, but no matter what they say, the tax will be ready to go, as scheduled, on July 1, 2010.
There are two interesting aspects to this debate. The first is the cross-party battles taking place across the country. In Ontario you have provincial Liberals walking hand in hand with federal Conservatives, while the provincial Conservatives are fighting back. In B.C., where the HST is also expected to pass, a former right wing premier has teamed up with the NDP leader to plan protests against the tax. It’s a little weird, and while some of this is just plain politics, the unusual alliances also show just how divisive this tax is. I wrote more about this in a Canadian Business story you can read it here.
I’ve written about this other issue in the past, but MoneySense magazine does a great job covering what the HST will mean to investors. There’s been some talk that the Liberals will make investments HST exempt, but so far that hasn’t happened. Read more about this here.
There are a number of other interesting HST-related issues hopefully I can get through some of them in the weeks ahead.
Blogs & Comment
HST: Alliances and investments
By Bryan Borzykowski
Just because you haven’t heard much about the Harmonized Sales Tax over the last few weeks doesn’t mean the Ontario government has stopped its plan to merge the PST and GST. Today, McGuinty’s Liberals tabled the HST legislation. The Conservatives will no doubt put up a fight, but no matter what they say, the tax will be ready to go, as scheduled, on July 1, 2010.
There are two interesting aspects to this debate. The first is the cross-party battles taking place across the country. In Ontario you have provincial Liberals walking hand in hand with federal Conservatives, while the provincial Conservatives are fighting back. In B.C., where the HST is also expected to pass, a former right wing premier has teamed up with the NDP leader to plan protests against the tax. It’s a little weird, and while some of this is just plain politics, the unusual alliances also show just how divisive this tax is. I wrote more about this in a Canadian Business story you can read it here.
I’ve written about this other issue in the past, but MoneySense magazine does a great job covering what the HST will mean to investors. There’s been some talk that the Liberals will make investments HST exempt, but so far that hasn’t happened. Read more about this here.
There are a number of other interesting HST-related issues hopefully I can get through some of them in the weeks ahead.