This just in: B.C. Liberal politicians put the biggest smiley-face Band-Aid they could find on the province’s bleeding books before the election, then ‘discovered’ to their horror that things were much worse.

Regular readers of this column learned this ‘news’ in February, when Finance Minister Colin Hansen’s pre-election budget baldly predicted that personal and corporate income tax revenues would increase in the fiscal year that started, appropriately, on April Fool’s Day.

You remember February. A St. Valentine’s Day massacre of U.S. banks and car companies stained the streets, and a cold rain of layoffs stretched to the horizon. To project rising tax revenues at this time was an exercise in dishonesty far beyond any of the “what did Hansen know about the deficit and when did he know it” rhetoric that dominated the legislature last week.

Hansen’s best retort to the NDP last week was that their election platform projected $600 million more in revenues than the B.C. Liberals’ did. Red books indeed, and a choice of overwrought fictions on offer for voters. In other words, politics as usual.

Last week Hansen presented the real budget, with the fiscal year now half gone. Beyond the headline-grabbing record $2.8 billion deficit (edging out the B.C. Liberal deficit of 2003), there were some major moves.

The most significant is the continued march from income taxation to consumption taxes. First came the carbon tax, and now comes the HST, joined by a 20 per cent increase in Medical Services Plan premiums.

For those concerned about deception, the MSP increase was billed as a six per cent increase on Jan. 1, a mere $3 a month for singles and $6 per family. Deep in the fine print one finds that this is the first of three annual increases, and that the six per cent annual increase is merely a projection. The actual policy is to increase MSP premiums by the rate of growth in health care spending each year, so the next two increases could easily be seven or eight per cent. Whatever the rate, it will be compounded, as each percentage increase is calculated on a larger base.

The good news is that the MSP premium assistance program is to be “improved” so that 180,000 low-income people will see their premiums reduced or eliminated. Exactly how much of an in “improvement” that is, the government doesn’t say.

And then there is the latest cut to provincial income taxes, a mercifully straightforward increase in the basic personal exemption from $9,373 to $11,000.

The 12 per cent HST sting is eased a bit by an exemption for home heating energy, so no hike for natural gas or electricity bills, although it’s not clear if the latter applies to those who don’t use electric heat.

Small businesses can expect to pay no income tax at all by 2012. The rate was slashed by 40 per cent just last year, and in this B.C. is following the lead of none other than Gary Doer, the retiring NDP premier of Manitoba.

It’s commonly noted that beyond the rage and politics of the HST, “value added” consumption taxes are easier to administer and harder to evade.

This is a shift of taxes away from employment and business creation. Recall that when unemployment spiked and then started to decline this spring, much of the recovery was self-employment, the small business with one employee.

This is the trend of the future. Governments are beginning to realize what “globalization” means to them – to tax jobs and business profits is to lose them.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for The Richmond Review, Black Press and BCLocalnews.com.