Severance pay bonanza: Ontario tax collectors cash in on HST

Severance pay bonanza: Ontario tax collectors cash in on HST by getting up to $45,000 to change job title

This ran in the Toronto Sun……. comments invited below

By Christina Blizzard, Queen’s Park columnist
Talk about double-dipping!

More than 1,250 provincial tax collectors, who will move over to the federal tax department when the province no longer collects sales tax, will get up to a six month pay bonanza.

It’s nice someone’s going to make money out of the Hated Sales Tax.

Too bad it’s fatcat tax collectors and not that single mom struggling to pay extra 8% the HST will add to her heating bill.

You and I will get dinged for an extra 8% on things like heating, gas and phone bills. Yet we poor suckers have to pay severance to people who aren’t really losing their jobs. They’re just moving.

“When it comes to severance, we will honour the agreements we have with our two bargaining units — Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU) and the Association of Management and Professional Crown Employees of Ontario (AMAPCEO),” Revenue Minister John Wilkinson said in an interview.

“From that point of view, we have contractual obligations and will fulfil those as a government,” he said.

The government signed a Human Resources Agreement (HRA) with the federal Canada Revenue Agency last week that will ease the transition of the provincial employees’ jobs to the federal level. The feds will collect the HST.

“We can’t pay people to collect a tax that doesn’t exist after July 1,” Wilkinson said.

Link to Story

Other links

Link - Sun
IFPress
The Standard
Windsor Star
You can also Google it

Please note, British Columbia is changing over in exactly the same way as Ontario but are not giving severance packages!

Now, this is just bloody obscene, but it's all thanks to that knob Dalton McGuinty! When are these abuses going to stop? We have a totally depressed economy, people are out of work in horrendous numbers and this @ssclown wants to give 1300 employees who are stopping their PST job on Friday and starting their HST job on Monday an average $35,000 (up to $45,000) severance package (read bonus!). At the same time our dollar is going up which will kill tourism and manufacturing jobs, which will in turn kill off retail and service industry jobs. They have a plan to pay off their collection agents, but forget the rest of the people they collect from.

Fire the lot of them, all 1300! And then advertise for new people to come in and fill the positions. If they are going to pay out a severance package then do the job right! Better still, fire the entire government and bring in an independent auditor for information transfer and finance, then maybe we can at least have 3 to 7 percent of them charged with criminal acts and treason. That goes for our lame @ss federali government as well. The people who make these stupid decisions need to be held accountable and do some serious jail time!

We need to stop the madness! Stop paying taxes of any kind and get this government to stop the abuses and fix the problems they have created, or otherwise get rid of them. Either way is good...

When are the sheople in this colony called Canada (read Governments Marxist Republik of Kanadakastan) going to wake up, recognize the abuses and corruption, and do something about it? This kind of crap is commonplace and happens all the time. It has to stop.

Cheers - Dave

[edit on 3/18.2010 by bobs_uruncle]