People Power and Premier Campbell’s Resignation
By Peter Ewart
Friday, November 05, 2010 03:45 AM
By Peter Ewart
Make no mistake. Despite what various pundits have speculated, it wasn’t the Liberal caucus that brought Premier Campbell down. It wasn’t the opposition party. It wasn’t the news media. Still less, it wasn’t Campbell’s “self-sacrificing” spirit for the “good of the province” that caused him to fold his cards.
Plain and simple. It was the people of British Columbia.
They were the motive force that compelled Campbell’s resignation over his decision to bring in the hated Harmonized Sales Tax (HST). Across the province, hundreds of thousands of people stepped forward to participate in this unprecedented campaign, whether by joining FightHST, signing the initiative petition, participating in rallies, writing letters to the editor, and many other ways.
The Government has vast resources at its disposal. It has numerous shills and apologists who have used every means possible to throw mud at the FightHST movement and its leadership. And it has parliamentary processes that act like bull pens to keep the people corralled and docile, their participation in this democracy limited to voting just once every four years, the rest of the time confined to a kind of “elected dictatorship”. It was this “elected dictatorship” that allowed Campbell to thrust the HST on the province just two months after an election campaign in which there had been no mention of the tax at all.
But there was one small breach in the fence of the “bullpen”. It was the Initiative and Recall Act, which was brought in twenty years ago, once again by the will of the people. The political parties in the Legislature did everything they could to make the Initiative and Recall Act extremely difficult for voters to use effectively. But not quite impossible.
Despite all the “barbed wire” put up, people were successful, collecting over 700,000 signatures in a short period of time in support of the Initiative. This feat of “people power” discombobulated the government and started the process of its unravelling, of which the resignation of the Premier is just one episode, with more episodes still to come.
The issue now for the people of the province is to keep up the pressure. The HST can and will be defeated. If whoever is left in the present government persists in defending it, they, too, will be swept away, as they should be.
There are those in the government and media who don’t want to acknowledge that the people of this province, as a collective body, have won a great victory. Some pundits have even gone so far as to buy into the fairy tale that the Premier has resigned for “family reasons”.
What they especially don’t want to acknowledge is that it is precisely because British Columbians took the issue into their own hands that this victory came about. Indeed, this victory was achieved because the people of this province refused to be confined to a political process that renders them passive and standing on the sidelines.
We need to defeat the HST. And we need to develop more and better mechanisms that will renovate and advance our democratic process so that “people power” and citizen involvement is not the exception, but rather the rule.
Peter Ewart is a writer and columnist based in Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca
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Posted by: Eagleone on November 5 2010 7:14 AM
should the referendum to remove it succeed, as Campbell has promised to do.