It seems appropriate to extend seasonal greetings at this time to Babel’s current Member of Parliament. It is most likely that he will be history before another Yuletide is upon us. Nothing seems to emphasize it more than the unusual column he ran in the Barrie Examiner this past week. His column suggests that the province still has time to rethink its foolish imposition of the Harmonized Sales Tax.
Who writes this guy’s stuff? Does the writer not check the Member’s voting record in the House of Commons? Has the writer not read a newspaper in the past year?
If the Member actually wrote that column, he would have to be a blatant liar and a fool. The column says `The federal government did not decide to harmonize Ontario`s PST with the GST.` In as much as the federal government (in the person of Jim Flaherty, the Conservative Finance Minister) offered to give Ontario $4.3 billion if the province would agree to the harmonization, whose idea was it?
Is it possible the Conservative party writer was joking?
This writer has already said he does not like the HST. In the last posting, I said I do not believe that the HST is revenue neutral. I also said I do not believe that it is all that good for business in Ontario.
But Premier McGuinty does not ask me for advice. I am a liberal and I do not believe in consumption taxes. Taxes on goods and services are taxes on the poor. They do not fairly tax the rich. To legislate income tax relief and increase consumption taxes is a way of putting more of the tax burden on the poor in our society and Premier McGuinty should be ashamed of himself.
The Member of Parliament for Babel (Temporary) does not feel shame. Even if the item in the Barrie Examiner was not written by him, he must have approved it. It bears his signature. He thinks he can split hairs and lie to the voters. He is wrong. He thinks that type of chicanery is fair in politics. He is wrong. He thinks that he can keep doing and saying whatever he wants to get re-elected. He is very, very wrong.
And there are very few Conservative Members of Parliament who are that stupid. Mr. Brown is supporting the blatantly right-wing approach of the new Ontario provincial Conservative leader Tim Hudak. Hudak is fighting a deliberately hypocritical and losing battle against the HST because, no matter what happens, a Conservative government in Ontario would never remove the tax. Hudak is making the same dishonest case as Babel’s Member of Parliament.
There is a new lower level of sleaze in Canadian politics and Babel’s Member of Parliament has shown us how low he can go. It is time to do something about it.
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