Trick or Treat

It's interesting to see the Tories rush what would have been a good news spring budget up to October and take a 1% GST cut out of their next election platform by bringing it in now. I suppose with money to burn and Dion calling for tax cuts, it was inevitable that Flaherty would be slashing taxes. As for the GST cut, given that every economist and every news story calls it "bad policy but good politics", I suspect Harper recognized that it's usefulness as an election issue had passed and that he might as well get it off the table. People aren't stupid - after a while "bad policy but good politics" simply becomes "bad policy and bad politics".

More interesting is the arrival of a new auditor general's report. Even from Paris, the timing looks a little coincidental:

Back in the mid-'00s, we used to enjoy a chuckle whenever the Paul Martin crew would come up with some extraordinarily contrived sideshow in an attempt to bury an embarrassing headline.

But even that PMO would never have thought it could get away with announcing tax cuts on 24 hours' notice, simply to bury an auditor general's report.

UPDATE: As pointed out by an astute reader, the federal government must give 60 days notice to the provinces that harmonize their taxes before changing the GST. As a result, if they wanted to make the change for January 1st, it had to be announced yesterday so it was likely not connected to the AG's report. It's still interesting to see them rush the GST cut to January 1st, but it doesn't look like there's anything involved in the day-to-day timing of it.


UPDATE2: I elaborate a bit more on my thoughts on this Macleans post.