Vander Zalm launches anti-HST petition

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Using a populist law he helped launch 20 years ago, former premier Bill Vander Zalm formally launched his petition Tuesday to repeal the harmonized sales tax in B.C.

Mr. Vander Zalm was in his final year of office when he proposed a referendum law that would allow the public to shape government policy.

The Recall and Initiative law didn't take effect until 1995, under a New Democratic Party government. Although the current law grants even greater powers to citizens than the model Mr. Vander Zalm proposed, to date no proponent has managed to collect enough valid signatures to force citizen-drawn legislation on the government.

"I like the legislation," Mr. Vander Zalm said in an interview Tuesday. "But I don't like the rules that have been drafted to go with it, they are ridiculous. In democracy, you have to have a process that is workable."

His petition states that the HST should be extinguished because it violates the province's constitutional right to impose taxes for provincial programs.

To succeed, the petition must be signed by at least 10 per cent of registered voters in each of the province's 85 ridings in the next 90 days. The proponents must rely on registered, volunteer canvassers to collect those signatures and cannot spend more than $5,000 on advertising.

While Mr. Vander Zalm estimated he has 3,800 canvassers so far, by late Tuesday afternoon Elections B.C. had approved 1,835. Some ridings had just three registered canvassers.

However, he maintained that, unlike the six failed attempts to use the initiative law in B.C., this one will succeed despite the steep hurdles. "In this instance, we have people who are young, old, NDP, Conservative - it doesn't matter which political party - coming on side with us."

B.C. will merge its provincial sales taxes with the federal Goods and Services Tax on July 1 to create a 12 per cent harmonized sales tax. Pollsters have found the change, announced without warning just months after the last provincial election, has been highly unpopular with voters.

The deadline for Mr. Vander Zalm's petition drive is July 5 and Elections B.C. has until mid-August to determine if the petition succeeds.

Even if enough voters sign the petition, the HST is not automatically extinguished. An all-party committee of the legislature would then have four months to decide whether to recommend legislation or to send the issue to a province-wide vote, which wouldn't occur until September 24, 2011.

B.C. Finance Minister Colin Hansen questioned whether Mr. Vander Zalm's initiative could derail the HST in B.C., even if his brigade of canvassers collects enough signatures.

"The provincial referendum process would not have any impact on the federal government," Mr. Hansen said Tuesday. "It is the federal government implementing the HST, it is federal legislation."

But political scientist Dennis Pilon of the University of Victoria said the initiative process can still effect change by demonstrating the force of the public opposition.

And even if it fails, it could give the B.C. Liberal government trouble.

"It depends on what the proponents are trying to do," he said. He noted the initiative is also backed implicitly by the New Democratic Party Leader Carole James, while Mr. Vander Zalm has tried to revive the right-of-centre parties as an alternative to the reigning B.C. Liberals.

"They are all political operatives - it's not Sally from the grocery store leading this campaign," he noted.

"Whether or not this succeeds as a referendum, it may succeed as a drive to validate a third-party option in this province," he said. "Both the NDP and Vander Zalm would like to see that."