HARMONIZED SALES TAX

"Harmonized sales tax" is probably the most spectacular April Fool's Day prank I've seen in years...too bad it's an actual tax policy.

We started talking about it yesterday as part of a general discussion of Canadian politics. I wasn't sure what "harmonized" meant, but it sounded nice. Well, as it turns out, "harmonized" is just a weasel word for "tax grab"!

The province has taken the liberty of combining GST and PST into a single (therefore "harmonized") sales tax, claiming it will be simpler and lead to more tax rebates for the lowest-income families, blah blah blah.

What it really means is that we'll now be paying PST as well on everything we currently pay GST on. Because I'm a student, my two greatest purchases are food and books--neither of which I've previously ever had to pay PST on! (Admittedly, most of my groceries are zero-rated--that is, the taxes are applied at a rate of 0%, meaning I'll continue not paying tax on them.) But seriously! How did McGuilty get away with this?!

And the best part? The memorandum published to explain the tax rules for food under GST and HST includes the following policy statements:

P-79R The Supply of Fondue Chocolate, P-81R Tax Status of De-Alcoholized Wine, P-213 GST/HST Status of Certain Ice Cream, Ice Milk, Sherbet, Frozen Yoghurt, Frozen Pudding Products, P-224 Meaning of Catering Services, P-232 Meaning of "Other Arrangements of Prepared Food", P-240 Application of GST/HST to Products Commonly Described as "Dietary Supplements" and P-241 Meaning of "Other Similar Snack Food" Under Paragraph 1(f) of Part III of Schedule VI to the Excise Tax Act.

Any government that has a policy statement about the supply of fondue chocolate is either brilliant or hopeless.

MUSICIANS:

I am an artist who does not create art.

This is not my phrase, just a very good description of my life to date.
In fact, I may be worse than an artist: I am a musician.

Artists struggle to create something outside of themselves. But art is easier to recognize than music. Some pieces of art are derided as being "too abstract" or "too modern". But we can understand that colours on canvas, pencil on paper, metal or stone carved to shape, are kinds of art. We may think they're worthless, but we understand that they are art.

Music is not the same. Music that is not recognized as music is just noise. We struggle too, to create something outside of ourselves, and 99% of us will never succeed. Even a child can create art; it takes a gifted hand to create music. I have been a musician for fourteen years, and all I have to show of my own work is an eight-bar chord progression. Nothing else. Music is so hard to come by that we are forced to replicate the works of grand masters when our own efforts to create fail.
And though the music of our grand masters is indeed formidable, it is not our own. We cannot even make it our own when we play it: our interpretation is not judged by its own merits--it is determined to be successful or unsucessful depending on how faithful we were to the composer's intentions, on how well we emulated their style. Horowitz, Zimerman, Rubenstein, Yundi...everyone has their favourite, and their favourite is inevitably the performer they believe has most closely presented the piece "the way it was meant to be played".

Painters do not spend their lives reproducing Mona Lisas and water lilies, and being praised for their adherence to the original. They strike out on their own, experimenting, showing the world what they see. But our lives are much worse as musicians, because we overwhelmingly cannot show the world what we hear.