Do not waste your breath denouncing the Liberals for reneging on their seeming campaign pledge to scrap the GST. After the Liberal flip-flops on NAFTA, the deficit, monetary policy and much else, it's a bit late to be just now discovering that the Grits have a talent for fibbing. Admittedly, it was a remarkable addition to the Liberal canon that they should continue to lie even as they were pretending to come clean, claiming that their earlier promise was merely a "mistake," even congratulating themselves for not being "cynical."

But after all these years, deceit is so integral a part of the party's brand of politics that one has come rather to expect an untruth than the opposite. A lie detector, under the circumstances, would seem worse than superfluous; a truth detector would be more useful. At some point, the principle of buyer beware must apply: Anyone who voted Liberal in the belief that they were actually going to abolish the GST should not be allowed outdoors without an envelope pinned to their overcoat.

If the Liberals' reversal over the GST is noteworthy in any regard, it is for having managed the difficult feat of making John Nunziata look principled. Do not shed too many tears for the outcast Liberal backbencher: This is the best thing that has happened to him in all his time in Ottawa. A week ago, he was an irrelevant, opportunistic blowhard. Now they're talking him up as a provincial leadership candidate.

It is not, of course, for embracing the tax that the Liberals are to be condemned, still less for engineering the provincial harmonization, if only in part, that always eluded the Tories. It is for having ever promised they would do otherwise. It is not, likewise, that the Liberals have adopted the same value- added tax, in every essential feature but one, as that with which they hung the Tories. It is the way in which they propose to change it - by making it invisible - that should raise an alarmed and patriotic citizenry to open revolt. No wonder the Grits were so keen on gun control.

The GST is a masterpiece of tax design in many respects, but in one above all is it to be praised: You know when you're paying it. You know how much you're paying. And you know who to blame. It is that most democratic of taxes, the tax that does not shrink from public view, but boldly dares the citizen to ante up for the public services he is so quick to demand. It is in your face, not just part of the time, like provincial sales taxes, but all of the time, no matter where you turn, a constant visible reminder that Nothing Comes Free.

I may be one of about 16 Canadians who actually likes the GST, but frankly, most of us have come to accept it, however grudgingly. Constant media reference to the-hated-GST notwithstanding, most of the public fury over the tax subsided not long after it was introduced. Why, then, did it provoke such initial outrage? Because it was new. Or rather, because it seemed to be new. In truth, of course, it merely replaced the old manufacturers sales tax: In place for 75 years, yet, because it was slapped on at the factory gate, all but unknown to the public. The GST raised no more revenue, all in all, than the MST; it was not a "tax grab." It simply made an invisible tax visible.

Not that the Tories deserve too much sympathy. The real tax grab occurred in the years prior to the GST, when the Tories jacked up the MST from 9 per cent to 14 per cent. Yet that 50-per-cent tax increase went through without a peep, where the revenue-neutral GST provoked a constitutional crisis. Can we not see a lesson in this? As a visible tax, any attempt to raise the GST above its current 7-per-cent rate would be the subject of, shall we say, vigorous public debate. And rightly so: Each percentage point on the tax is worth another $2.5-billion in revenues. But make it invisible and the Liberals would have a free hand to raise the tax any time they liked, and let the retailers take the public heat.

The Grits have the gall to pretend they are doing this as a favour to consumers, preserving them from the dreaded "sticker shock," or as the Finance Minister put it the other day, the "rude awakening" when the final price is entered at the cash register. How much sweeter it is to sleep, they soothe us: Sleep, the sleep of the innocent, as the government silently picks your pocket.