Elections B.C. review of anti-HST petition results could take several weeks

An Elections B.C. official says it could take until August to verify the signatures on the petition to stop the hotly debated B.C. harmonized sales tax.

Under provincial legislation, the organization's chief electoral officer has up to 42 days from the time the documents are submitted to determine if the citizen-initiative effort has met all requirements.

Petition organizers say they will deliver the petition for review tomorrow (June 30) in Victoria, claiming they collected more than 700,000 names since the provincewide campaign started on April 6.

Leaders of the Fight HST group, headed by former B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm, also claim they exceeded the requirement to gather names from at least 10 percent of the voters in each of the province’s 85 electoral districts.

Anton Boegman, with Elections B.C., said the verification process will involve manual review of the petition sheets and cross-referencing against a list of registered voters using a computer system.

“We think it’s going to take the full 42 days,” Boegman told the Straight today by phone.

B.C. Stats will also contact a sample of several thousand signatories either by phone or mail to confirm their support for the petition, Boegman said.

Before the petition can be declared valid, Elections B.C., a non-partisan body based out of the legislature, will have to confirm the registered proponent has met all financial requirements.

Boegman said only six citizen-initiative petitions have been submitted for review in B.C. since the legislation governing the process was introduced in the mid 1990s.

All of those efforts failed after officials determined early in the reviews that not enough signatures had been collected.

But opponents of the 12-percent HST hope for a different result from Elections B.C.’s pending evaluation.

“If their numbers are true then it will certainly pass the first phase of verification,” Boegman said.

“But where it goes from there depends on the accuracy of the work that the canvassers have done and whether people have signed in the right district and things like that,” he added.

“What we are doing here, if we go through the whole process, is something Elections B.C. hasn’t done previously.”

If successful, the petition could lead to the introduction of a bill in Victoria to repeal the HST or a provincewide vote on the tax, which comes into force on Thursday.