CBC News on-line
**Excerpt**
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has promised to cut the GST if his party wins the federal election.
At a campaign stop in the Toronto area, Harper announced his intention to reduce the goods and services tax by one percentage point immediately, then by another point within five years.
That would mean reducing the tax to six per cent in 2006, and then to five per cent.
Canadians would have $4.5 billion put back in their pockets with the first reduction, Harper said. An average family of four earning $60,000 a year would pay about $400 less in taxes. The GST reduction would be a "tax cut you see every time you shop. No politician will be able to take it away without you noticing."
The Tories have long been contemplating a cut in the sales tax as a campaign plank. Harper said cutting the GST would be "more effective in stimulating consumption than anything the government's proposing."
Liberal promises already include billions of dollars in income and corporate tax cuts, but the party went into the campaign having rejected the idea of cutting the GST.
Pointing out on Thursday that he himself is an economist, Harper said: "I believe that all taxes are bad. It's always good to keep taxes down."
He noted that while the Liberals were in power the amount of GST taken from Canadians has doubled, from $15.9 billion to $31.8 billion.
"Canadians have a right to ask where the doubled GST revenue is being spent," he said.
"The government has money to waste, the government has money to steal, the government has money to spend on benefits for a few .... It's time for benefits for mainstream Canadians, hardworking people who pay their taxes, who play by the rules."
