I just finished watching Marketplace on CBC this Sunday afternoon. That’s what happens when CTV cancels this weeks edition of Question Period.
The last 10 minutes of Marketplace was dedicated to seeing if consumers were really seeing the GST cut that the Tories have brought in.
They start off with a Tim Horton’s coffee and confirm that Tim’s is, indeed, passing on the GST cut by cutting the cost of coffee. I can confirm this because the price of an XL coffee used to be $1.59 and after the 2 point cut it is now $1.56. Yay Timmy’s!!!
But every other price they looked at was for a set price item. i.e. prices that have traditionally been rounded to a dollar (or half dollar).
They start off with a Saturday Toronto Star. $2.00 before and $2.00 after. Since a large portion of newspaper sales are via the box on the street corner, this one is a given as an item that would not change in price. Who the heck is going to want to put $1.98 into a newspaper box slot?
They then proceeded with Parking machines, parking meters, Live Theatre tickets, taxi cab fares and movie tickets. All of which have stayed the same with the base rate of the product going up meaning no cost savings to the consumer.
I don’t know about you, but I have noticed the tax saving on restaurant food, where the tax is added in AFTER the cost of the meal. I have noticed the tax savings in my grocery bill which far outweighs any money I put into movies, cabs, or parking. I have also noticed it anywhere the price of the item is set with the tax being added after the fact. Store owners did NOT go around the store bumping that $3.99 box of cereal to $4.03.
This was simply a poor reporting job by the CBC. The sad part about something like this is that most of the items they looked at were items that lower income Canadians do not typically use.
Lower income earners ride the bus over taking a taxi or paying for parking. The Conservatives put in a tax credit for the bus riders. Lower income earners might go to the movies occasionally, but more often than not they do not go see a $120 show at the Royal Alex in Toronto as the Marketplace segment showed. In fact, video rentals add tax AFTER the fact so that $3.99 rental that cost $4.59 after tax is now only $4.51. Thank you for my 8 cents!!!
Chalk this one up to that left wing bias our publicly funded network is known for.
