Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Petition is Successful but.......

because of the court action Elections BC is blocking the Anti-HST act going to the legislative committee that would consider the Act or send it to referendum.

The court action is about the validity of the act contained within the petition.   The case is not going to decided for a long time and that does not include appeals of any decision.

My one big question, under what authority can the Chief Electoral Officer delay this?   There is nothing within the Act for referendums that spells out reasons to delay sending it to the legislative committee.  It feels like he has over stepped his authority.  And to add insult to injury, Craig James is only the acting Chief Electoral Officer.

It is disturbing that Elections BC has not put any information about their decision on their website - it is now 6:30 pm on August 11th and the news has been out there for over an hour now.

The decision by the Chief Electoral Officer is reckless and without regard to orderly government in this province.  Craig James has created the context for up to a year of political chaos in this province with very little hope of any effective government once we are in the new year.  The crazy part is that he could have let it go to the legislative committee and let them deal with any issues of constitutionality of the proposed act and not caused any increase in political problems.

His decision means there will be good people recalled because of it.  If the process was moving along towards a referendum in 13 months time, there would have been no serious attempts at recalls.  Now he has slapped the over 700,000 people that signed the petition in the face.  He has pushed people enough that they will take dramatic action.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fascistic point! Its all way to obvious that the government is doing everything they can to hinder the petition, legal or not.

Regarding why Elections BC has not posted the results, apparently they recently announced they would not be announcing them at ALL!

Anonymous said...

There is NO reason to send this to referendum. The #'s tell all. Ditch the HST already. This fight is not going away.

stephen elliott-buckley said...

If it were to briskly be decided to go to a plebiscite in 13.5 months that would not actually stop the gang of recall-ists just itching for November to start. Some, yes, but many are already organizing.