I'm not holding my breath until the HST is well and truly out of our lives.
For one thing, I can't hold my breath for more than about 35 seconds without getting very uncomfortable, and Madame Christy won't start negotiating for the removal of our HST wart with Dr.
Stephen Harpo until at least this weekend. And expect those "negotiations" to take a good bit of time.
Nope. You'll be able to get hip replacement surgery - for both hips - in less time than this HSTectomy is going to take. Frankly, while I'm game to be pleasantly surprised, I'm not convinced it's going to happen at all. Sorry. (And even more sorry about how silly I'll look when - hopefully - it turns out I'm wrong.) This may be just my cynical side, born of too many years of watching politicians crawling out of the cracks and crannies of the nether parts of reality.
But I don't believe for a moment that we're done with this HST thing.
Before Christy can get rid of the HST, she'll will have to negotiate a deal with Ottawa.
Let's consider that federal finance minister Jim Flaherty already got on his hind legs - just before the HST ballots were counted - and said he was "confident" that B.C.'s provincial government would honour it's part of the HST bargain - which is to say, keep it.
Also consider the strength of Christy's negotiating position, when her own finance minister, Kevin Falcon, has made it clear he thinks B.C.'s anti-HST voters blew it. Will My-Way-IS-The Highway Falcon bring the same negotiating skills to Ottawa that he used to bear down on Langley Township council over the Mufford overpass? Ottawa may not be quite so easy to bully.
And everyone is already talking about how we're going to have pay the feds back their $1.6 billion HST bribe... forgetting that we've got only a portion of that money so far. Plus we're being primed with estimates of how incredibly long it will take to make the huge switch back to the HST.
Let's step into my handy-dandy Wells-O-Matic Time Machine and take a peek at what next spring might hold for us, shall we?
Christy calls an election after having been thwarted by Ottawa in her efforts to "listen to the people" and negotiate the death of the HST. She runs on the "I Tried" platform, pointing out that the feds wouldn't let us switch back to PST/GST because they didn't really believe that the referendum was about the HST, but about the "way it was done".
The only way to kill the HST, she speechifies, is to re-elect the BC Liberals. If we re-elect Christy and her solidly prodemocracy/antiHST party, the feds will have to know that the Yes vote was really anti-HST, and not just lingering anti-Gordon Campbell resentment.
Electing the NDP, she will point out, will only prove that the people of B.C. are still angry at the BC Liberals, and never REALLY wanted to kill the HST.
The only way for the Yes vote ultimately to win will be to re-elect the BC Liberals. Then, after B.C. re-elects Gordo's legacy party, Christy can say, "You re-elected us to do what's best for B.C.'s economy. And the HST is what's best for B.C.'s economy."
Still later, when Harper calls a federal election and needs to keep his B.C. seats, he will point his finger at Christy, blame the continued HST on her, and after re-winning his majority government against a flailing fedLib party and a stillstrengthening NDP, declare that the results prove that the people of B.C. really wanted to keep the HST all along.
Bob Groeneveld is the editor at the Langley Advance
