Fight HST Turning Serious Debate into Clown Show

(Aired on September 21, 2010)

There probably isn't one person who sees this editorial who is surprised MLA Terry Lake's name is near the top of the list of targets for the anti-HST recall campaign. As the chair of the legislative committee who made the unpopular decision of going to a referendum on the HST, and an MLA who didn't have a big margin of victory last year, that shouldn't be surprising.

Lake's future is hardly in doubt, even though his committee copped out and took the easy way out of the HST controversy by going to a referendum a year away. It was a cop-out because by next September, the fuss over the HST will be gone, and we will have spent millions of dollars on nothing. All because the Liberal members of Lake's committee used the excuse that the referendum was a way to listen to the people instead of having the guts to debate the issue in the legislature and take a vote. This way, they blame the anti-HST forces for causing us to spend all that taxpayers money instead of simply saving it by voting on it instead. And if you're going to have a referendum, have it sooner rather than later so we can have a vote while the issue is still a hot topic.

What I can't figure out, though, is why Bill Vander Zalm and the anti-HST forces are turning the whole recall process into a clown show by making it into some kind of Survivor game. That's about as tactless as Lake's committee's decision on the referendum. If Chris Delaney and VanderZalm are serious about this issue, and they've put a lot of work into it so far, why would they cheapen the whole thing by this charade? Maybe they're simply giving up. They don't even have a proponent to run a recall campaign in Kevin Krueger's riding. Maybe it's all over and the anti-HST folks are just going through the motions. I can't think of anything else given the stupidity of their latest move. This is a serious thing. Treat it that way, or walk away.