penny tax

Aaron Wherry makes sense of QP’s numbers

As Don Martin noted, Maxime Bernier’s script last week was focused on the idea that the NDP was proposing a new infrastructure tax.

This seems to have become a thing last week. Sun News learned about it on Tuesday. And the Prime Minister referenced it during a news conference on Friday.

The story originates with a proposal Olivia Chow submitted to the Transport committee on October 28. Ms. Chow proposed that the committee “should explore the topic of infrastructure funding and examine a comprehensive set of policy options. The committee’s recommendations should then inform Infrastructure Canada as the federal government designs a post-2014 long-term infrastructure investment plan.” Ms. Chow listed five “potential policies to examine,” the fourth of which was a “penny tax”—a “one percent municipally-levied value added sales tax.” (I’ve copy and pasted Ms. Chow’s proposal below in its entirety.)

The Conservatives might now wish to suggest that the NDP is proposing such a tax, but, when the committee discussed Ms. Chow’s proposed study on November 1, Conservative MP Ed Holder specifically asked Ms. Chow about the idea and Ms. Chow responded as follows (emphasis mine).

Mr. Chair, a few years ago, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the big city mayors came up with the one-cent GST proposal. If you want me to go and find details of how that one-cent GST works, I could do so. This is not a new idea. It is something that has been proposed by the municipalities and the big city mayors. They ran a big campaign on it.