Former B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm angrily attacked Elections BC Wednesday after it admitted that even though a petition seeking a repeal of the HST passed the necessary threshold for signatories, it would take no further action until all outstanding court challenges were resolved.
“We will not, however, stand for this,” Vander Zalm told a crowd of supporters near the Vancouver Convention Centre August 11.
“We will recall every Liberal MLA in the province if that’s what it takes.”
Fellow HST opponents have long believed the petition itself would go nowhere in terms of eliminating the controversial tax.
Vocal HST critic and former NDP strategist Bill Tieleman previously told Business in Vancouver that even if the petition met Elections BC’s threshold and it subsequently delivered the accompanying HST Extinguishment Act to the legislative committee established to deal with the initiative, it would not be an effective way to axe the tax. (See “Bureaucratic blunder blamed for BC Liberals’ inept HST sales job” – issue 1079; June 29-July 5, 2010)
That committee, a majority of whose members would be B.C. Liberals, could then recommend the government either:
Tieleman told BIV he thought the committee would choose to advise the government to table the initiative and then the government would let it die on the order paper without it ever coming to a vote.
Tieleman has long claimed that recalling MLAs would be the only sure-fire way to eliminate the tax.
Recall campaigns are eligible to start in November 2010.