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British Columbia Finance Minister Kevin Falcon is reflected in a television screen as he responds to the results of the HST referendum at the B.C. Legislature in Victoria, B.C., on Friday August 26, 2011.Darryl Dyck/ The Canadian Press

B.C. NDP Leader Adrian Dix says that, given the chance, he will speed up the demise of the harmonized sales tax, with an NDP government killing it in less than a year.

He said 11 months – the period of transition to the controversial tax defeated in a provincewide referendum last week – is a reasonable timetable for returning to the status quo of a 7-per-cent provincial sales tax and a 5-per-cent federal goods and services tax, and that the March 31, 2013 date set out by the Liberals is a 19-month delay that will only serve to increase economic uncertainty.

"The sooner we get back to a clear situation where people can make their own economic decisions based on knowing what the tax system will be, the better," Mr. Dix said.

B.C. Finance Minister Kevin Falcon was unavailable for comment on Monday, although his office issued a statement saying an 11-month time frame does not take into account the "complexities" of scrapping the HST. If the government can make the transition in less than 18 months it will do so, the statement said.

In a background briefing, Finance Ministry bureaucrats said it was relatively easy to adopt the HST because of earlier work done with Ontario and Atlantic provinces on the tax. The return to the PST is uncharted territory and more complicated, they said.

As well, there are challenges in reregistering 30,000 new businesses that have never worked with the PST, and rehiring staff at the provincial level to process the PST.

One key challenge, they said, is that they have to wait for Ottawa to set rules for transition that British Columbia can, in turn, assess and respond to Ottawa's submissions. The province, they said, cannot complete its rules until the federal rules are done.

Eighteen months was described as a pretty aggressive schedule for the transition, though one official noted that the transition would be done more quickly if possible.

Mr. Falcon said last week that he would be travelling to Ottawa next month to meet with federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to talk about the process.

Premier Christy Clark said she and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, while attending an event in Abbotsford on Sunday, had discussed working through the transition back to the PST and agreed they should quickly resolve any fallout from the matter.

Mr. Dix suggested a possible political motive for the delay, noting "at this point in [the B.C. Liberals']mandate obviously there's a political motivation for everything."

He said the current government has lacked a firm economic plan on various issues. "What we haven't had from the current government is any plan at all since Ms. Clark became premier," Mr. Dix said. "She's doing a lot of politicking. I know if there was an HST on photo ops, we would have balanced the budget in her time in office. But there hasn't been much substance."

The 18 months, the government has noted, is consistent with a timeline proposed in an independent panel on the HST. The Liberals have promised to provide quarterly updates on their efforts during the transition.

Still, Doug McArthur, a public policy professor at Simon Fraser University, said the timeline strikes him as a bit slow. He said he was skeptical about whether the timeline was set out on the basis of any operational reality or rather as a forecast that has now become accepted.

"I'm not saying [the 18 months]is bad faith [but rather]that it just got accepted that that's what it will be," he said.

Prof. McArthur, whose experience in government includes six years as deputy minister to the premier and cabinet secretary during the 1990s NDP governments in B.C., said it seemed to him that a year should be a more reachable target.

He said the government should hurry the transition so that people don't delay such big-ticket purchases as housing – a stagnation that would hurt the economy.

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