Anti-HST campaign gets approval

The fight to put an end to the proposed B.C. Harmonized Sales Tax has just turned a new corner.

Bill Vander Zalm, former B.C. Social Credit Premier, has been officially certified by Elections B.C. to embark on his mission to scrap the controversial tax.

Vander Zalm now has two months to prepare for the next aspect of the task, the petition drive itself.

Beginning April 6, petitioners will have 90 days to gather signatures.

To succeed the petition will need 10 percent of the names on the voters list in every one of 85 ridings, about one in ten voters.

If the effort fails in even one of the ridings, the whole petition is thrown out.

The closest a recall effort has come in B.C. was the 2002 campaign against Liberal MLA Val Roddick.

To date there has never been a successful recall in the province’s 138-year history.

“I would encourage people to sign this petition,” says Fraser-Nicola MLA Harry Lali.

“This whole HST initiative was based on a lie and the electorate never had a chance to vote on this tax.”

Organizers at first believed they had crossed the threshold and had succeeded in obtaining the required numbers, but during the vetting process 1 in 4 signatures were deemed invalid.

If the petition does manage to meet all of the requirements, a committee of the legislature would then submit the anti-HST bill for review.

The committee would then have three months to take action on the bill with two possible routes that it could take.

The first would be to submit a proposal to the Legislature with a recommendation that it be introduced as a draft bill in the Spring 2011 session.

This only obligates the Liberals to give the bill first reading and with a majority in the legislature in no way compels them to accept the recommendations.

“If only seven Liberal MLAs voted against this legislation it could also be stopped,” says Lali.

The second route the petition could take is for the committee to send the proposal back to the Chief Electoral Officer for submission to the electorate in a referendum.

Even if this does result in a referendum question on the next ballot in 2011 it would have to garner the support of 50 percent of all registered voters in the province.

Premier Gordon Campbell won a third majority for his Liberal party last year after promising that there would be no new taxes.

The B.C. Chamber of Commerce sees the HST as a positive step and has been asking for the common collection of both the GST and the PST since 1989.

Jon Garson, B.C. Chamber policy director says the tax will make B.C. a better place to invest, the core benefit being the elimination of the provincial sales tax saving businesses over $2 billion a year.

“Come July 1, 2010, 90 per cent of Canada’s economy will be operating under a single sales tax system,” says Garson.

“The only major country in the world that does not operate the single sales tax system is our neighbours to the south.”

Currently, signatures are being gathered by various groups including the Stop HST and the BCNDP which currently has over 60 000 signatures.

To sign visit www.stophst.com or www.bcndp.ca/hstpetition.

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