Total Recall: B.C. edition

The provincial Liberals are in a recall fight over the hated HST, but don't count the Grits out yet.

California and British Columbia have a lot in common: Pacific Coast scenery, a thriving pot culture, and now, recall politics. Angered by the Harmonized Sales tax, B.C. voters are threatening to recall Liberal MLAs, and have launched a petition to scrap the HST. Under the Recall and Initiative Act, public support for the petition has forced Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell to call a referendum on the HST next September. And until then he’s doing everything he can to gain back the lead he’s handed to the opposition NDP.

Campbell was legally obligated to call the referendum, and yet “the process outlined by Victoria risks being seen as trickery,” says a Vancouver Sun editorial. Campbell has said that he will accept a simple majority in the referendum, even though the law defines a successful vote by the higher standard of 50 per cent of voters in two-thirds of all ridings. And should the HST be scrapped, Campbell says he will not abide by the petition’s stipulation to refund what taxes have already been collected. Because the government is ignoring these aspects of the Recall and Initiative Act, “it should now go the rest of the way and take the whole process out of the ambit of the act,” argues the Sun. Victoria should circumvent the recall process and just hold its own clearly-defined referendum, sooner rather than later. B.C. needs to move on.

While many have already declared the NDP victorious in the next election in 2013, the Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason says you can always count on “the dicey, often confounding wild card known as the New Democratic Party” to shoot themselves in the foot. “Look at the party over the past 20 years or so and its trademarks are infighting, tumult and an inability to coalesce around a common, winning vision.” Party leader Carole James has already had to fire one of her MLAs for dissent. Campbell can be comforted by the fact that the election is 944 days away, and “the NDP could implode at any time.”