VanderZalm has Uphill Fight

(Aired on March 29, 2010)

If Bill VanderZalm is going to derail the Harmonized Sales Tax, I think he's going to have to do better than he did in Kamloops Saturday. If people were so upset about the tax, I would have thought people would have come from all over the Interior to participate in the rally. Nothing gets government thinking like large rallies to bring matters to the forefront.

No matter what the turnout, the big push will come starting this weekend, when the battle to find enough people to sign a petition gets underway. 10% of the registered voters in each riding must sign a petition to move it to the next level, which could be either a bill by a standing committee to eliminate the HST or a move for a vote which would be held in September, 2011. It's an uphill battle, but it will that battle which will determine just how much opposition there is to the tax.

To get 10% of voters in every single one of the 85 ridings in the province is a huge task. Organizers will have to make sure they have committed people on board. It's not just a matter of going around the neighbourhood to get names. You have to make sure every one of those signatories is eligible to be there. But if the opposition is truly there, we might find an interesting situation where the government has to face the people on the matter.

The tax is controversial because it will vastly increase the number of things we are taxed on. It's a cash grab of the highest magnitude, forced on us by the federal government who dangled the funding carrot over the B.C. government's head and pretty much pushed us into going along with it. It gives the federal government way too much power over the province, and sooner or later, Ottawa will begin to tell us how much to tax and when, and we will lose a vital part of our control provincially over how we tax our residents. That may be more important than the actual money we will have to fork out if the tax comes into effect.