Re-labelled parking tax leaves 21% rate in place, then adds HST
Readers are abuzz about the plan to re-label the 21-per-cent PST on parking fees in Metro Vancouver so it won’t automatically disappear, like all provincial sales tax is supposed to, when the new harmonized sales tax kicks in.
Two common themes in the scores of comments we’ve received deserve to be explored in a little more depth.
First, a lot of readers see this as an HST-vs.-PST battle.
I don’t.
Nor have I switched sides, as a lot of true believers in both the pro-and anti-HST camps seem to think.
I think dropping the PST in favour of the HST was, and is, a good idea, although the way it’s being handled could and should be much better.
It was a political gaffe, or worse, for the provincial government to announce this shift after promising just months before that it wouldn’t. It was also a policy gaffe to do it without an effective plan to soften its impact on the already-onerous tax load that helps drive house prices through the roof.
But this new parking tax issue is in no way the result of replacing the PST with the HST. The problem is quite the opposite. It leaves in place the PST on parking fees — and at an unprecedented rate of 21 per cent — and then it adds on the HST.
In other words, it’s the worst of two worlds, the best of neither. Moreover, it’s the very outcome that the province’s deal with Ottawa is supposed to avoid.
Worse, it took an improbable stretching of definitions -if not of noses -to make it so. B.C. Finance Minister Colin Hansen had to totally dismiss the definition of the tax his ministry has promoted for years — that it is PST — and suddenly decree that it isn’t. Which sounds a lot to me as if he’s making stuff up as he goes along.
So I don’t think this policy strengthens the argument against the HST, a tax that stands up to analysis as fairer, less economically damaging, and more efficient than the capricious old PST.
Regardless of how this policy came to be, however, some readers like it — mainly those who think that there are too many cars on the road, and that if costs shoot up enough then more drivers will stay home.
I’m open to the argument that our region could benefit from intelligent road pricing — a system of tolls that ups the cost of driving at times and in places where the roads are congested. (I also note that this kind of approach is fair and practical only in cities like London or Singapore that have first-class transit options. In most parts of Metro Vancouver, we don’t.)
But — like TransLink’s failed attempts to impose a vehicle levy and a parking stall tax — this tax on parking fees doesn’t pass muster as a tool to ease traffic congestion. It’s true that higher parking costs might mean fewer cars downtown. But this punishing tax will also hit university students going to class in the suburbs, seniors visiting loved ones in hospital, sports and arts patrons at evening shows, and many more.
Depending where they’re coming from, many of these people really don’t have very good transit options.
So, no, this isn’t a “green” tax cleverly designed to change our collective behaviour.
And I don’t accept that it’s an indictment of the HST.
But I’m not going to argue with the large majority of responding readers who see it as a big black mark against the government that — depending on which version you accept — either imposed this tax or allowed it to be imposed.
December 15, 2009. Don Cayo. Vancouver Sun