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John Ivison: McGuinty offers Ontario a drink of HST Kool-Aid

Posted: November 16, 2009, 5:15 PM by NP Editor

It's too bad for Dalton McGuinty that one of the promises he didn't break after the 2003 election was the pledge to ban taxpayer-funded propaganda advertising.

The Ontario Premier brought in new rules that require the provincial Auditor-General to approve any partisan ads - a decision that has come back to haunt Mr. McGuinty as he tries to sell skeptical voters on the merits of his harmonized sales tax.

As Dwight Duncan, the province's Finance Minister, admitted today, the Ontario Liberals "tied our own hands on that one".

"It's a difficult set of circumstances. It's a complicated policy and it's almost counter-intuitive for people to pay sales tax on haircuts and things on which they weren't paying tax before, while the government tells them they're getting a tax cut. It's difficult to communicate for us and for the media because it doesn't lend itself to an eight second sound-bite. There's a lot of misinformation out there," he said in an interview.

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