Anti-HST team plans constitutional challenge

CBC News Monday, July 5, 2010 | 12:11 PM PT

Organizers of the Fight HST campaign in B.C. have announced they plan to launch a constitutional challenge of the new tax because it was never passed into law by the provincial legislature. Former premier Bill Vander Zalm, Chris Delaney and Bill Tieleman made the announcement on the steps of the B.C. Supreme Court on Monday morning. The B.C. government brought in the harmonized sales tax with an order-in-council and brought in legislation only to repeal the old provincial sales tax legislation, according to Vander Zalm. The announcement followed news last week that some leading members of the business community plan a legal challenge to the petition to stop the new harmonized sales tax. Over the past two months, Vander Zalm and his group collected over 700,000 signatures on a petition calling for repeal of the 12 per cent HST. But on Tuesday a coalition of businesses applied to the B.C. Supreme Court for a judicial review of the petition, arguing that the effort to repeal the tax under provincial initiative vote legislation should be dismissed because the new tax was created by a federal law.

Initiative tangle

Under B.C.'s initiative vote legislation, unique in Canada, if the petition is declared valid in court the government has two options it must exercise within four months. It could either send a bill drafted by Vander Zalm to the legislature, or opt for a provincewide referendum. If the government held a referendum and the initiative challenge got the support of more than 50 per cent of all registered voters — a challenging proposition — the government would have no choice but to send the bill to the legislature. In either case, an anti-HST bill would be unlikely to pass, given the 13-seat legislature majority held by Premier Gordon Campbell's Liberal government. But Vander Zalm and his team say they will use the province's recall legislation to target legislature members in order to get the government to change its stance on the HST, which took effect July 1.

Opponents say consumers will pay more under the tax because it applies to goods and services that were previously exempt from provincial sales tax, including haircuts, funeral services, and movie and theatre tickets. The provincial government argues the HST will reduce costs to employers, savings that will be passed on to consumers, and help create an estimated 113,000 jobs.