More than 1,250 Ontario tax collectors will get a severance package worth up to $45,000 each despite the fact they won’t be losing their jobs.

The move, part of the province’s plan to harmonize sales taxes with Ottawa, will see the provincial collectors become federal employees, triggering a payout critics said amounted to tens of thousands of dollars to change business cards.

The opposition parties said it shows how wrong-headed the HST is, but Premier Dalton McGuinty said the province is simply honouring an existing collective agreement.

“There’s an important part of our brand as a province, as a government, when we do business with each other and when we do business with the world, is that when we give you our word, our word is our word,” McGuinty said after an unrelated event in Listowel, Ont.

“I guess the alternative is we could introduce legislation in the house and say: ‘Look, you signed a deal and we signed a deal (but) it’s no longer convenient for us to respect that deal.’

“Where does that take you?”

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Revenue quietly announced the buyouts for more than 1,250 provincial collectors who will now work for Ottawa. It says the province had signed an agreement with the Canada Revenue Agency outlining “opportunities with the CRA for all Ontario government employees impacted by harmonization.”

“Essentially all employees will be made offers of employment to a CRA office in the same geographic location,” the release said.

The plan to harmonize sales taxes was introduced in Ontario’s budget last March, when Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said jobs in the public sector would be cut by five per cent over the next three years as the government struggled with a record deficit.

Duncan said about 2,000 Revenue Ministry workers would become federal employees under a deal with Ottawa, while the remaining 1,400 jobs would be phased out over the three-year period through attrition and other measures.

What the move really amounts to is giving a hefty six-month severance package to bureaucrats to simply change job titles, said Progressive Conservative critic Ted Arnott.

“Apparently, they’ll continue to work in the same office, they’re not going to miss a day of work, and they’re being paid up to $45,000 to change their business cards,” Arnott said in the legislature.

“Could you explain to my constituents in Wellington-Halton Hills _ many of whom are working two part-time jobs to make ends meet, many of whom dream of making $45,000 a year but aren’t _ why tax collectors are being handed that much when they aren’t even missing a single day of work?”

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said the windfalls just went to show “how wrong-headed” the HST policy really was.

“It really does show that the government didn’t think this out very well,” she said.

Duncan said Thursday the severance clause was introduced into the collective agreement by the Conservatives when they were in power, adding the transfer is an appropriate arrangement that will result in savings in the future.

“We thought it important to ensure that for those 1,251 employees, many of them in the Durham region, many of them in places where unemployment is a challenge, we would respect the collective agreement that’s been in place for many years.”

While he said he understood that some people who lost their jobs and received no severance may be upset about the payments, Duncan, like McGuinty, said it was important for the province to honour its word and “the word of successive governments in Ontario.”

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Ontario employees who accept job offers will join CRA in two phases — the first on Nov. 25, 2010 and the second on March 1, 2012.

A spokeswoman for Revenue Minister John Wilkinson said the total cost of the severance packages was still unknown and will depend on the number of employees who accept the job offer.

All employees who move to the CRA are entitled to legislated severance pay in the amount of one week per year of service to a maximum of 26 weeks.

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