Finance Minister Colin Hansen has no budget to fill your newspaper and TV screen with setting suns and soothing sermons about the benefits of the Harmonized Sales Tax.

So where does hip, high-tech guy turn? Facebook. The trendy social networking website is now a major communication focus for the B.C. Liberal government, and it’s where I found Hansen’s most detailed defence so far of the government’s summer surprise.

In a chatty note (signed “Colin” and giving his B.C. Liberal Party e-mail address), Hansen acknowledges the “strong reaction” of the public and quickly fingers the villain in this drama.

“If the only source of information I had was the daily media over the past two weeks, I would probably oppose the HST, too!” he writes.

“My preference would have been to announce this as part of Budget Day on Sept. 1. That would have given us more time to prepare better explanations as to why this makes sense for B.C. and make more fulsome explanations during Budget lockup.”

While I’m waiting for that lockup on Sept. 1 (better bring my own sandwich this time), here are some observations.

Hansen refers his Facebook friends to a five-page “business alert” paper by economists Jock Finlayson and Ken Peacock of the B.C. Business Council (www.bcbc.com) that sets out the case for harmonized sales tax. The public sees PST as only a consumption tax, but according to the economists, about 40 per cent of Victoria’s sales tax revenue is actually paid by businesses on a “wide variety of inputs.”

They cite the sales tax on machinery and equipment as a key obstacle to business investment that the HST will remove.

Turning to the B.C. government’s guide for business to the PST and its exemptions, one finds an excruciatingly complex description of machinery and equipment, especially “fixtures,” which are exempt. A bank machine or a greenchain is a fixture, a pickup truck isn’t.

Now I’m not an accountant, just a lazy, sensation-seeking journalist, but it appears to me that most business machinery and equipment is already exempt from PST. An economist for the United Steelworkers makes a similar point in questioning whether Ontario’s embrace of the HST will result in any great surge of business investment and jobs.

The B.C. sales tax underwent significant reform just a year ago, mainly to deal with the kind of business-stifling effects for which the HST is now presented as a panacea. Perhaps when the finance ministry materials are ready they will allay my nagging suspicion that the business boost of this measure is being oversold, as the consumer impact is lowballed.

The Business Council of B.C. economists predict that by the time HST is implemented next July 1, the economy will have recovered enough to absorb the effect it will have on consumer demand. And over time, goes the key argument, those input savings will trickle down to consumers in the form of lower prices.

This is where the NDP is finding traction, clawing forward to the front of the HST protest parade. The invisible hand of the market didn’t do so well in the recent economic collapse, says NDP finance critic Bruce Ralston, and the risky pursuit of excessive profit didn’t prove much of a deterrent.

Markets work, but only if they’re truly competitive. There won’t be any pressure on utilities like Terasen Gas to pass on their HST savings.

The chorus of cries has just begun for offsetting tax cuts, such as a break on liquor taxes for restaurants. A long lineup has already formed at Hansen’s office door.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca