British Columbia is officially in election mode and the parties are rolling out their campaign promises. When it comes to the tax promises of the two mainstream parties, British Columbians are confronted with a choice, as it were, between higher taxes or even higher taxes. So pick your poison.
To see how they stack up, lets look at each plan for the most important types of taxes. Its not a pretty picture.
It seems everyone has advice on how Western Canada should manage its resources. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair blames the oilsands for Dutch disease, the notion that high resource prices cause a hollowing out of manufacturing. Its a largely mistaken claim, given that manufacturing in Western economies has been under pressure from more competition from emerging economies for some time. Nevertheless, Mulcair would slow down the energy sector by adding a carbon tax (though hell skip the same as applied to the automotive industry).