Wednesday, September 01, 2010

The HST disaster continues for the Liberals

Check the websites for the major media this afternoon - the Times Colonist, Sun, Province, Globe and Mail, CBC - and you'll find coverage of documents released under FOI which challenge the Liberals' claims that the HST was "not on the radar" before the 2009 election and raise large doubts about their optimistic statements about the economic benefits of the tax.
As well as revealing big problems with the implementation of the HST, this qualifies, I'd say, as a great communications disaster. The government could have released the documents at any time. It could have waived the processing fee on the first FOI request.
Instead, it set an $800 fee for processing and releasing the public documents. The media apparently decided to share the costs and the documents, while developing their own reports based on the information - to be released at the same time.
Which was very bad for the Liberals.
The Times Colonist editorial here offers a useful perspective.

3 comments:

DPL said...

The FOI shows us the Gordo lied, as did Hansen, who keeps on lying. Gordo is off on vacation. We have a government that routinely lied to the voters and will keep on lying till they are replaced.

Anonymous said...

These people have refined the art of lying to the degree that Hansen had to explain to all of us dumb oafs that the released documents actually "reinforce" his earlier utterances and those of his colleagues about the HST.

You'd think that by now he has got to come to his own conclusion that this latest statement of his only "reinforces" the sad fact that the BC Liberals cannot be believed - whether they're telling the truth or not.

Does he dream up his preposterous arguments all on his own, or has he got a team of professional prevaricaters doing this business for him, and he's just going along? Either way he's just about out of wiggle room.

Raymond Graham

Anonymous said...

The real story is how the BC Liberals 'needed' the HST in the first place - they blew the budget.

Remember? 'The world is falling apart... not our fault... economy going downhill...

So the BC Liberals told us that there would be a $500 million deficit - but they had everything under control.

O0opz... our bad... the deficit is really $1 BILLION... didn't see that coming... we were out electioneering and in one month the deficit went from $500 million to $1 BILLION - in one month it wnt up $500 million... but don't blame the BC Liberals - its Glen Clark's fault... here eat this HST.