On familiar tactics

For those wondering whether Brad Wall's HST letter in the Star-Phoenix should offer any comfort to Saskatchewan citizens who don't want to see the province's tax structure altered to benefit corporations at their expense, let's take a look at what he has to say:

(A harmonized sales tax) would extend the PST tax base to a broad range of goods and services that are presently exempt from the provincial sales tax...

Such items that are currently PST-exempt include energy-efficient appliances, membership fees for clubs and gyms, newspapers and magazines, taxi fares, restaurant food and the professional services of architects and accountants. This is a major concern.

The harmonized GST would make it harder for future provincial governments to lower or raise sales tax rates, which reduces flexibility. In short, a harmonized GST is not something that is contemplated in the B.C. Liberal platform.

Oops, wrong HST response. But it still says plenty about how seriously we should take Wall's words:

Our government is not of the orthodoxy that the HST must be the No. 1 priority in a jurisdiction that needs to do more work on competitive personal and corporate tax rates, as well as lower property taxes.

Moreover, the discord fomented over HST implementation and all the attendant exemptions, credits and tinkering to make it politically palatable highlight the comparative efficacy of tax reform in other areas.

The discord and tax burden shift resulting from an HST do not fit with (the Sask Party government's) objectives.

If anything, one can find far more of a principled objection to the HST in the B.C. Libs' campaign statement (which was of course fully inoperative within a matter of weeks). Wall doesn't say for a second that he disagrees with the principle of making citizens pay more for the benefit of corporations - only that he doesn't want to deal with the political consequences of pushing it through, and figures he can do as much to make the tax system more regressive in other ways without the same backlash.

What's more, if Wall's lone reason for not harmonizing immediately is the question of whether it's "politically palatable", then it's worth keeping in mind that the political calculations involved might change radically by December 2011 if he figures that any anger will die down by the following election. And even though Campbell's similar conclusion has proven to be spectacularly wrong, it's entirely plausible that Wall might still figure that he can get away with the HST in the absence of the petition and recall processes that have kept the issue alive in British Columbia.

In sum, Wall's letter looks to be just one more example of his slightly tweaking the Campbell playbook to get to the same end result, rather than representing any reason for optimism that he'll avoid imposing harmonization on a province that's already definitively rejected it once before. And unlike their B.C. counterparts, Saskatchewan voters will have only one chance to send the message that they're not about to accept an HST.