Businesses hope HST won't spoil home cooking
Cowichan restaurant owners are concerned about the extra seven per cent their customers will pay under the new HST.
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Updated: August 02, 2009 8:36 AM
Cowichan industries most impacted by the recently announced harmonized sales tax hope the provincial government will re-think parts of the plan.
“I think it’s totally unfair to the consumer,” said David Lee, owner of Duncan’s Dog House Restaurant.
The HST, announced last week, combines the five per cent GST and seven per cent PST and takes effect July 1, 2010.
This means consumers will pay a single 12 per cent tax on items they previous paid both GST and PST on.
But it also means British Columbians will pay an extra seven per cent on items like restaurant meals and new homes, items which previously only saw the five per cent GST added.
“Consumers are getting hit with a seven per cent increase on their meals,” said Lee.
And, he added, that’s bad for business all around.
“Some people may decide they can’t afford to eat out.”
Meanwhile, at the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board, president-elect Cliff Moberg is assessing what kind of impact the HST on new homes will have on the housing market.
“At the provincial level (B.C. Real Estate Association) we’re in the process of trying to boil this down, to get a basic foundation so we can talk realistically about what we think the impact is going to be,” said Moberg, a broker with Duncan’s Sutton Group.
“It’s really preliminary right now, but through a number of people at the B.C. real estate level we’re looking at this and trying to determine where we are, and then we’ll formulate a policy that we feel we’d like to put forward to the government.”
The province is accepting these kinds of proposals in an effort to ease the transition to the HST.
As it stands, the new tax “certainly has some negative impact,” Moberg added.
But the tax has received positive feedback from other areas of business, which applaud the move toward a single tax system. In fact, the move will save businesses millions in administrative costs while boosting provincial coffers with $1.6-billion in federal cash for transition costs.
But others, like Cowichan Valley MLA Bill Routley, said the increase in taxes on items like airline tickets, haircuts and even funerals is over-burdening British Columbians at the worst time.
“As a result of this (Liberal) government, you can’t even die without paying more taxes,” he fumed.
“If the NDP had done this, people would be screaming doors down.”
Routley’s also mad the provincial Liberals didn’t share the plan with British Columbians during the May election campaign.
“I just find it unbelievable there is not more public outrage over the deceptiveness of this government,” he said.
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