Struggling with HST

Andrea Horwath says the provincial government should do the right thing and remove the harmonized sales tax from residential heating bills.

The call came months after the Ontario NDP leader made a similar plea to Queen’s Park to remove the provincial portion of the HST from heating bills. The public simply can’t afford skyrocketing utility bills, Horwath said on Monday during a brief stop in Thunder Bay.

The enormity of the increase has hit home now that winter has set in, she said.

“People are just shocked at how much extra money they’re paying on their home heating bills for the HST. So we expanded our campaign to get the HST off hydro to getting it off heating as well,” Horwath said.

Using her own figures, Horwath said the average family of four is spending about $220 more on utilities a year since the introduction of the HST last July.

“Altogether the HST on the average family is about an $800 hit,” she said.

The money is not being used to provide more services, Horwath claimed, but instead directly into the pockets of big business through generous corporate tax cuts.

“Not a dime of that money is going in to putting nurses in hospitals and keeping small community hospitals open, making sure people get access to primary-care physicians, because all of the money and more, $2.2 billion worth, is going out the door in corporate tax giveaways.”

This is not the time to place more burden on Ontario’s families, she added.

“Everywhere I go people are still telling me they just can’t make ends meet. This is a way of giving people a much-needed break in a way that’s fair and transparent and very, very easy,” Horwath said.

She added the Dalton McGuinty Liberals may have given tax breaks to offset the added reach of the HST, but families have yet to feel the benefits.

“Middle-income folks are slipping into poverty in some cases. The kinds of jobs we lost during the recession are not being replaced,” she said.

“Even the ones we are getting are not the high-paid decent jobs that actually sustain communities and families. The jobs that are coming are service-sector jobs, part-time jobs, precarious work that doesn’t really provide a decent income for folks.”

On that note Howarth said the province really needs to look at the viability of a separate Northern Ontario energy price, calling current charges a slap in the fact to a region that produces cheap energy, only to sell it to the grid and charged the provincial rate to buy it back.

“There’s a real problem that needs to be addressed, not only for individuals and families, but for the economy as well. There’s real opportunity here to utilize the assets that are here in a way that help sustain communities and help sustain our economy,” she said, promising to put in place a plan to help Northern Ontario become more autonomous to keep its communities strong.

MP Bruce Hyer (NDP, Thunder Bay-Superior North) said the federal government does have a role to play, and said like Horwath, the NDP caucus plans to push hard to have the federal government remove its portion of the HST from energy cost and home-heating fuel.
 
“It’s one of the things we’re going to be looking for in the budget,” Hyer said.

It’s not something he expects to see when the budget comes out later this year.

“It’s hard to say what (Prime Minister Stephen) Harper will do in almost any area. He’s a bit unpredictable. He might surprise us and please us and a few of the other things we’d like to see on that budget so that we can feel more comfortable perhaps voting for it.”