Bill Vander Zalm’s Fight HST campaign has mobilized and invigorated the most apathetic electorate in British Columbian history. If the 705,643 signatures on the anti-HST petition are valid, it will mark the the first time in Canadian history that a citizen-sponsored initiative has passed the signatory stage; but regardless of whether the initiative succeeds on a legal basis, the movement has given British Columbians a taste of the previously-unknown powers and perils of direct democracy.

According to Bill Tieleman, Fight HST organizer and influential columnist with The Tyee and 24Hrs newspaper, the groundswell of public outrage coupled with the use of these powerful tools has changed BC politics forever.

“This is every cliche in the book - this is waking up the sleeping giant, et cetera.”

Direct democracy allows individual citizens to draft laws and vote directly on matters of public policy. In our current system of representative government, the average citizen’s power ends with their ability to elect a representative - the theory being that elected officials translate into law the wishes of those who elected them, and if they don’t, they get voted out in the next election. The aim of the system is to provide accountability while at the same time sufficient stability for government to implement their agenda.

In BC there are two pieces of legislation that bypass the representative system: the Referendum Act, which allows for questions to be put directly to the general public as a vote; and the Recall and Initiative Act, which contains two provisions: one allowing citizens to recall their elected MLA at any time, and another permitting them to draft questions to be posed to the public as a referendum.

Ratified in 1990, the Referendum Act was the first tool of direct democracy in BC. Ironically, it was introduced by the Social Credit government lead by then Premier Bill Vander Zalm. Shortly after the act’s inception, (but not before Vander Zalm resigned in scandal) the Social Credit party used it to ask the electorate if they wanted more direct democracy.

In a 1991 referendum British Columbians voted overwhelmingly in favour of legislation for both recall and initiative, and on September 24, 1995 the Recall and Initiative Act was brought into law, where despite its initial popularity, it lay dormant for nearly fifteen years.

That is, until the HST. Organizers of the Fight HST campaign laid out a three-phase plan to force the government to repeal the HST. First, they drafted a piece of legislation called the HST Extinguishment Act, and registered it as a citizen initiative; second, they launched a court case challenging the constitutionality of the tax; and third they planned a recall campaign to remove MLAs one by one in an effort to destabilize the government and force it to either repeal the tax or lose its majority. Both recall and initiative are incredibly onerous processes. A successful citizen initiative requires the signatures of 10% of voters in every riding in British Columbia, and the recall of an MLA requires the signatures of 40% of the riding’s voters from the last election.

For Bill Vander Zalm, who sees the HST issue as a catalyst for empowering the public through direct democracy, the high thresholds have rendered the legislation ineffective. “Right now it’s a pretense - it makes it look like we have a vehicle for direct democracy, but except for an issue like HST, it would never work.”

According to Ujjal Dosanjh, current Liberal MP and former BC Premier, that’s the point. After the 1991 referendum Dosanjh chaired a committee that consulted voters and made the recommendations that would later become the Recall and Initiative Act. Dosanjh explains that the high signatory requirements were put in place to avoid political instability and the erosion of minority rights seen in places with high occurrences of citizen-sponsored referenda. “We wanted to make sure that we have a society that is civil and stable, protects the basic rights of everyone, and doesn’t allow us to be whipped into a frenzy over minor issues.”

California is the oft-cited example of citizen initiative run amok. Critics, like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, claim the process has ruined the state’s ability to govern and subjected the state to the tyranny of the majority. With its relatively-low threshold for qualification, there are an average of 20 citizen-sponsored initiatives on every ballot, running the gamut from rewriting the entire state Constitution, to outlawing same-sex marriage.

According to Vander Zalm, while the California system is too relaxed, ours is too restrictive. “People will find ways to abuse it, so you gotta make it difficult enough that it doesn’t get abused, but not so difficult that it doesn’t work - there’s got to be a proper balance.”

Vander Zalm says that he’s committed to the reform of direct democracy even after the HST fight is over. He says technology should be leveraged to allow for greater participation in our democratic processes. “By democratizing the system, that goes a little bit beyond amending legislation - I think most everyone now has a computer, they have the internet, there ought to be ways by which they can participate online.”

Bill Tieleman believes that the reform Vander Zalm seeks is now inevitable. “I think it would be extremely hard for any political party that comes to office to completely ignore the need to fix the recall and initiative act to make it more accessible and fair to the public. I think this campaign has fundamentally changed that equation, and I don’t think any party can ignore that at this stage.”

Former BC Attorney General Geoff Plant agrees with Tieleman that reform is likely, but thinks that the Fight HST’s successful use of citizen initiative has exposed weaknesses in the Recall and Initiative Act that will actually lead to its demise.

“I think that there is a way to attack or challenge government policy,” explains Plant. “It’s political processes, it’s letters to the editors, phone calls to your member of the legislature, and it’s in the ballot box. Initiative was not intended for that process, and I think the fact that it has been so successful here probably creates the seeds of its own demise.”

He sees similar issues with the Fight HST campaign’s use of recall:

“Recall is about personal conduct and the personal decisions of an individual member of the legislature. It is not intended as a tool to oppose government policy, and yet clearly that’s what’s being planned here, and while they may be able to do it, I think that accelerates the moment in time when some government is going to be elected and says, ‘that’s actually not democratic; the place where our decisions are ultimately to be judged is the ballot box, not a recall initiative,’ so they’re either going to define recall narrowly, or they’re going to get rid of it altogether.”

“My own view is that what we’re seeing here is the misuse of potentially valuable instruments, that’s going to have the effect of undermining the goal of more accountable government because it’s going to result eventually in the elimination of the tools of recall and initiative.”

While Ujjal Dosanjh believes that the use of the initiative process to oppose the HST is within the spirit of the legislation, he shares the concerns of Geoff Plant regarding the use of recall as a tool to depose government. “There is merit to the idea that by referendum you should be able to oppose any policy that the public intensely dislikes, except rights of minority, equality rights, and things of that nature, but in terms of recall - the recall legislation was not meant to cause an overthrow of government because you disagree with the public policy of that government.”

Tieleman is unfazed by the argument and says that unless the government withdraws the HST and reverses it, there will be recall campaigns come mid-November.

Whether the public’s anger will be sufficient to support the campaigns promised by Tieleman this fall, or whether they will prefer to have it out with the BC Liberals in the 2013 general election is impossible to say, but with a charismatic old warhorse like Bill Zander Zalm committed to its pursuit, and influential columnist Bill Tieleman throwing his editorial clout behind it, the growing application of direct democracy in BC is a serious possibility.

Even Geoff Plant concedes that the movement has rejuvenated voters. “I do think that the speed with which it was possible to organize this campaign, and the size of the campaign, have probably given everyone in British Columbia a renewed sense of empowerment about what they can do to make their voice heard.”

The question is now, what will we do with that power?

Photo credit: Jay Currie