by Eva van Loon

The Harmonised Sales Tax which is supposed to come alive next summer with a 12%  tax on most goods and services is, if nothing else, impossible to figure out.That’s a problem for everybody, but especially for those in business.

HST will cover many more goods and services than PST now does. And that’s a problem, potentially, for a class of business the government apparently hasn’t considered but which we all depend on to fill a wide variety of needs.

I’m talking about microbusiness, the zillions of small operations that don’t even come near the $30,000 annually that would attract GST; so don’t have to worry about GST inputs and outputs or hiring a bookkeeper to do payroll and financial statements—or taxes.

I say zillions because I’ve really no idea how many workers fall into that category in Canada; I just know I meet people in microbusiness all the time.

My own business, fixing learning disabilties, falls nicely into that category. It provides a high-quality product with a hefty price tag, since the therapist has to be highly trained for this work. I don’t do much of this work—maybe half a dozen students a year, but they will all tell you how essential this service was for them. One of the nicer aspects of billing them is that I needn’t charge them any tax, and one of the nicer aspects of my tiny business is that I don’t have to employ someone to do sales tax, or spend long hours doing it myself.

That’s about to change. Try as hard as I might, I can’t get a final answer from the HST website on whether my kind of educational services will be HST-exempt. The nearest to an answer is a requirement for me to find some kind of stamp of approval—who knows what?—from some kind of official educational body—also far from clear.

Great. So, if I have this right, either I get some official educational body to rubberstamp my revolutionary, out-of-the-box, cutting-edge therapy as an “approved” educational service, or I suddenly have to charge my clients $500-$600 more for the course. Oops! How am I going to pay for the bookeeper I’ll need now, or for the hours I’ll spend being the government’s tax collector? Maybe I’ll have to raise those prices even more. Yah. That should work. My clients are going to love that.

The government will suddenly gain a hold over all those lovely little pots of money of the small, independent entrepreneurs and practitioners who, I suspect, are no small fraction of the working poor. Control must be the real reason for instituting this comprehensive system—that, or government job-creation.

How many microbusinesses in our town, I wonder, are in a similar boat?

Cynicism is seldom productive but I find it hard to stay away from thinking that HST will force many to decide between becoming the government’s tax collector or black marketeering. If HST goes through, I plan to close my practice, and Powell River will no longer have access to cognition therapy.All three responses—closing, compliance, or black marketeering—represent a loss to the community of economic diversity and self-reliance.

There’s still time to protest. Rather than promote any one website, I urge you to get online, search Harmonised Sales Tax, and become knowledgeable and active on this issue. Miracles do happen.