Looking after pennies so the dollars can look after themselves

I have listened to all the hoopla over Harper’s GST tax cut last week. I even read the Globe and Mail editorial on why it is all apparently a wrong headed policy move but at the end of the week none of it has moved me. Harper’s hit on something that all Canadians can benefit from on a basic everyday level. Every time I buy a service or a product I am paying GST. I cannot even go to the grocery store without paying GST on a variety of ordinary everyday items that I use to run my home from floor cleaner and laundry soap to tampons and tinfoil.

When one lives on a small limited budget; every penny counts. The thirty-five cents I pay to buy a product to clean my floors with or the fifty-nine cents I pay for budget shampoo and conditioner adds up to $11.20 cents yearly and that is just two ordinary low cost items. I literally buy thousands of small cost items or services every year. For $11.20 I pay in GST on those items I could spend on other things to improve the quality of life for my family. That’s two pairs of jeans at a second-hand store or a new set of hand bindings for my son from just those two items alone.

It doesn’t seem like much but you start adding up the real cost of paying that tax on a yearly basis for every product and service Canadians pay GST on the total amount enters into the thousands. The fact that the items are individually small is insignificant when you are poor or on a fixed income and those small amounts grow in terms of personal significance. The GST credit rebate for low income Canadians does not fully insinuate or off-set the real cost of the GST tax for fixed or limited income Canadians. This is something that helps not in a quarterly or annual way but in an immediate basic way every day for thousands.

I readily admit that it would significantly impact those government surplus numbers, but so sorry, I am just not interested in inflating the total budget surplus numbers for the government to waste on a safe injection site for drug addicts or running public service commercials telling me that “homelessness is not a choice”. And I would point out to the Globe and Mail editorial board and all like-minded souls that Harper hasn’t said he favours a cut in the rate of the dreaded GST over a cut in income taxes. If anything, hold onto your seat as this is just the first installment of tax cuts we would see under CPC governance.