Urinating Into the Wind, As Provincial Policy
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
Whatever their societal warts, you have to give Ontario’s native people credit. They fought the HST and they won.
It is appropriate that Canada’s aboriginal peoples are the last to cling to the freedoms which we all came here seeking. Besides the HST, their insistence on land claims, and entrepreneurial spirit in the tobacco industry, are demonstrations of their resistance to the overbearing actions of government. They also involve illegal activity, which in Ontario victimizes a meek taxpayer, and a spineless government. The Caledonia farce is a perfect example of natives extorting maximum benefit from those weaknesses, and scoffing at many laws. As is the infiltration of the cigarette market to the level of an alleged fifty percent.
Both of these realities, which fester as we speak, are a result of the leadership vacuum displayed by the invertebrates in the McGuinty government. But that does not negate that natives deserve praise for filling that void and becoming the consequence in the fulfillment of the law of unintended consequences. If the McGuinty government insists on the legislative equivalent of urinating into the wind, natives will provide high-speed fans.
McGuinty’s administration has been urinating into the wind on so many issues that this space cannot do them minimum justice. The tobacco issue, however, is a prime example. I don’t know how many tax increases the poor, endangered smoker, has endured, but I know for sure the HST is going to hit him again. In the face of such contrary idiocy, natives have been happy to fill the demand for reasonably priced cigarettes. Let me anticipate the howls of the anti-smoking lobby. This is idiocy because we played this game of stomp the smoker back in the eighties, and it produced the identical outcome – a growing industry operating just below the legal level. Must we reenact Einstein’s definition of insanity every time, or did some of McGuinty’s crew believe themselves to be smarter? What on earth made them think that?
The victimization of a legal “sin” activity has resulted in enormous loss of revenue and a growing monster underground industry which McGuinty will address by hiding under his bed just as he has done with Caledonia. But, just to verify that he is unclear on the concept, he will continue to pour gasoline onto that fire with higher and higher taxes, until a single pack of cigarettes costs a ransom, and everyone is smoking native. And that is just a preview. I believe the generally comatose Ontarian will become an awakening giant and go native in the way many goods and services are exchanged, as a reaction to the HST.