Faaaaan-tastic! Former premier Bill Vander Zalm is riding into Squamish this Sunday (May 9) on a rising tide of public opposition to the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST).
And if the Vander Zalm-led campaign to force the repeal of the HST legislation his petition succeeds, the dreaded HST will be history. Right?
Uh not so much.
The HST petition exposes for the first time the hollowness of B.C.'s much-vaunted initiative and recall legislation. Until now, no petition has come close to reaching the incredibly onerous threshold of 10 per cent of all voters in each of B.C.'s 85 ridings.
With anger rising across the province about the HST -partly due to the tax grab, but also because of the sneaky way the tax was never mentioned during last spring's provincial election and then suddenly unveiled just days after the vote - this one might just do it.
Several ridings have already met and exceeded the 10 per cent threshold just a month into the three-month petition campaign.
But it only takes one - like, say, West Vancouver-Sea to Sky, which at this point has only three per cent of the required 10 per cent of voters - to stop the whole petition dead in its tracks. And the stringent verification process will likely invalidate plenty of signatures, meaning that each riding probably needs at least 12 to 15 per cent of all voters to ensure that they wind up over 10, making the hill even steeper.
But even if the petition passes the mark in every single riding, that means the tax is dead. Right?
Wrong. According to the legislation, meeting the petition threshold only obliges the government to either hold a general referendum or introduce a bill in the legislature to repeal the HST.
It doesn't bind our MLAs to vote in favour of the bill.
And even if the government decides to hold a referendum on the petition question (why would they if they can stop it just by introducing a bill and voting it down?) and that referendum passes, they still only have to introduce a bill, not vote in favour of it.
It makes the entire campaign an exercise in public theatre. The only effective power the petition has is to shame the government into acting contrary to the clearly-expressed wishes of the people - and shame seems to be a quality particularly lacking in Victoria.
The BC Liberals are clearly working on the premise that while anger to the HST may be strong now, the deck is still stacked enough in their favour that they won't have to go to referendum.
And even if they do, they have three years for the public's fury to die down before they face the voters at the polls. Which makes this piece of political theatre more farce than tragedy.
-Tim Shoults
