NDP see opportunity with Liberal-Conservative HST

I'm not sure if this is a positive or good article for Ontario's NDP. Regardless, there is a definite opening for the party to exploite this issue as the NDP is the only party, both on the provincial and federal levels, who have been consistenly opposed to the Harmonized Sales Tax. The HST is a clear collusion between Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative federal goverment, and the Liberal provincial governments in British Columbia and Ontario. From the Globe and Mail:

New Democrats are eager to talk about taxes.

This is a new thing, at least in Ontario. But after much consternation and internal debate, they decided it was a necessary step in the long, slow rebuilding of an image that's never recovered from the battering it took nearly two decades ago.

The message of Andrea Horwath's party against the new harmonized sales tax, which took effect on Canada Day, has not been quite as simplistic as that of Tim Hudak's Conservatives. But it's often been more convincing.

For one thing, the NDP isn't conflicted by federal cousins who partnered with Dalton McGuinty's Liberals to implement the new tax. Instead, it’s tied to the only party in Ottawa that firmly opposed the policy.

For another, the NDP's position actually makes sense. The Tories have claimed the HST is a “tax grab,” which it’s really not. The NDP more accurately argues, at least sometimes, that it's a shifting of the tax burden from businesses to individuals. And that's something that, alone among the parties, it can very strongly and credibly oppose.

Despite very limited resources, the third-place party has also often outflanked the Official Opposition on tactics. It was the NDP that caught the Liberals flatfooted this spring, with its release of a study based on Statistics Canada numbers that showed the average family’s costs going up by hundreds of dollars annually.

But however effective the messaging, the question asked by some New Democrats is what any of this achieves, other than helping the Tories get some votes.

Very few people tend to vote NDP because they're mad about taxes. And, not coincidentally, many old-guard New Democrats don’t really want voters to be mad about taxes. They worry that, in contributing to an anti-HST backlash – a backlash that may be less about harmonization’s specifics than a general feeling of over-taxation – they’re helping their ideological opponents make the case for smaller government.

For those New Democrats who view their party primarily as the province’s social conscience and voice of the disaffected, it was also difficult to get past the fact that the HST, and its accompanying package of tax reforms, doesn’t really hurt the lowest income groups so much as the middle and upper ones.

Ultimately, though, the NDP's decision makers saw in the HST an opportunity to finally convince Ontarians that they care about their pocketbooks. That wasn't a problem, they suggest, before 1990. But since Bob Rae's government, the perception as a party of punitive taxation has impeded it from being competitive.

Few Ontario New Democrats are under any illusion that an election campaign primarily about taxes would work to their advantage. But if they can at least neutralize the issue, to make it look like they're no more a party of high taxes than the Liberals, they think they can have more success fighting on other fronts.

In the short term, it won't be easy to measure the rewards of this strategy. Unless the bottom completely falls out on the Liberals in the next campaign, there's only a handful of seats – a couple in Northern Ontario, one or two in Toronto, one in Hamilton, another in Ottawa – that the NDP realistically has a chance of adding to the 10 it currently holds. The biggest effect of a sustained uptick in popular support would probably be to help the Tories in ridings where they’re the ones challenging the Liberals – a familiar and unsatisfying result for New Democrats.

But for a party that's had to fight tooth-and-nail in recent elections just to keep its official status, there are few quick fixes. It's a slow build, back from the margins. And in their opposition to the HST, New Democrats hope they at least have a building block.