Work-in-progress: Argument development for Ontario, Canada´s Harmonized Sales Tax

While democratic governments are increasingly pressured (by social, political, or economic forces) to find new methods to create revenue that will enhance and/or maintain existing services, their ultimate challenge is to bring forward necessary taxation policies while minimizing the depletion of their political capital when these policies are unpopular with citizens. This challenge is particularly difficult in the case of democratic nations, as governments can be dissolved and political parties can fail to win the support of their constituents in the next election. One of the methods of taxation that is becoming increasingly popular is value-added taxation. To better understand how taxation messages are communicated, I will research selected instances of Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) taxation communication in Ontario (a form of value added taxation), specifically looking at the rhetorical appeals used in the communications and assessing the challenges and successes of the communications. I will use as communication examples a video, a press release, and a government web page. My goal is to discover how an effective argument is developed for taxation communication, from start to finish, and come away with an understanding of what is going on in the minds of those who shape taxation communication-and possibly those who receive it. The outcome of this research will inform the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, economics, and public sector communication. In this paper, I present information on in-progress research on argument development for Ontario´s Harmonized Sales Tax. A subsequent article on the results of the research is planned for submission to IPCC 2015.