"The dirty little secret of the past decade is that the provinces have quietly filled a tax void created when the former Conservative government cut the federal goods-and-services tax in the mid-2000s. The two-percentage-point cut would have put roughly $14-billion a year back into Canadians’ pockets – if the provinces hadn’t grabbed it." Very well said. The GST cuts were one of the best things that Finance Minister Flaherty did. They allowed a fiscal rebalancing towards the provinces and made possible the switch of BC, Ontario and PEI from PST to HST regimes and the removal of most of the remaining differences between the QST and an HST except for the collection of the tax by Quebec government employees. BC later went back to a PST but Flaherty can hardly be blamed for that.