BC Election 2013

Langley Township councilman Jordan Bateman made some headlines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) recently with his comments regarding BC Finance Minister Colin Hansen. Bateman subsequently redacted the comments, and put up an apology instead.

The media is going nuts about the matter, but I am simply writing to express my support for Jordan, who is much better in office than outside. Not only is he a good writer, but from what I can see he is a quality individual.

According to a Vancouver Sun post by Vaughn Palmer, there are government documents available (bottom of the article) that clearly discuss the contemplation of implementing the Harmonized Sales Tax before May 2009. The government (specifically Premier Gordon Campbell and Finance Minister Colin Hansen) have repeatedly been on the record in saying (roughly) that it was only considered after the May 12, 2009 election.

Although I had my own very high level of skepticism at these assertions, recent documents clearly show that they were (in what is a very generous way of characterizing the situation) exaggerating the truth.

Specifically:

A document from a January 16, 2009 First Ministers’ meeting with a summary analysis of harmonization;

A document with a February 23 and March 9 date with a document called “Harm Feb 23 2009.doc” and “Harmonization BN.doc” (unfortunately as far as I know these documents are not available);

A document – Briefing on March 12, 2009 to Colin Hansen about the merits of Harmonization. Unfortunately, a lot of the juicy matter is likely behind the Section 13/16 redactions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

A document showing that the Finance Minister likely received advice sometime in March regarding Ontario’s decision to harmonize, and a progress of documents showing the likely preparation of media statements and strategy (that would be a Section 13 FOIP redaction).

My guess, looking at all of these documents and reading between the tea leaves (of which there are no “smoking guns”, but there is something deeply, deeply smoldering with the scent of freshly fired gunpowder) makes me suspect that the finance minister gave the go-ahead to staff to pursue harmonization with the federal government sometime around February-March of 2009, and then gave the final approval shortly after the May 12, 2009 election.

The impact of these documents should lower what is already a low public perception of trust from the government; this should also be the absolute last of the “it was only contemplated after the election” line that was being given at the onset of the HST announcement.

Elections BC has released the HST Initiative Petition detailed results. They can be downloaded here.

When playing around with the numbers, there are some interesting clues that come out of the process:

1. People in Abbotsford were least likely to sign the petition, while people in the West Kootenay area were most likely to sign the petition. None of the electoral districts got to the 40% threshold (the recall threshold), but West Kootenay got up to 34.7%. The electoral district closest to gutting the initiative was Abbotsford South, with an 11.8% signing rate. If 600 less people signed in Abbotsford South, the petition would have failed.

2. Out of the 705,643 claimed signatures to the petition, Elections BC verified 557,383 of them, or about a 79% “hit” rate. This was much higher than what my intuition would have guessed.

3. Two electoral districts had more verified signatures than what the Fight HST campaign claimed – Coquitlam-Maillardville claimed 6021 signatures, but 6788 were verified. Port Moody-Coquitlam claimed 5786 signatures, but 5917 signatures were verified. I am guessing the number count got messed up somewhere down the line for the Fight HST campaign, but considering the amount of paper that they had to deal with, I don’t blame them.

4. The electoral district with the least number of valid signatures was Peace River North, with 56% of signatories being valid.

5. I find it unlikely a recall campaign will be successful. The most highly ranked riding with a BC Liberal member would be Donna Barnett in Cariboo-Chilcotin with 31.5% of registered voters signing.

I will let the tables of data speak for themselves and write something later about the question of: “What next?”

Table 1: HST Initiative, by Electoral District – Verified Signatures to Threshold Difference

Table 2: HST Initiative Petition, by Electoral District – Verified Signatures to Claimed Signatures by the Fight HST Campaign:

From Bill Tieleman:

BC Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman said this afternoon that he plans to issue his decision at 10 a.m. Friday if at all possible,after hearing arguments from a big business coalition that wants to invalidate the Initiative petition signed by 705,643 voters.

Politically, it is a win-win for the Fight HST campaign. They would politically score if the judge were to rule against them. They can then take the populist rage to the streets by saying that 700,000 signatories (assuming no duplicates) had their wishes turned over by the judiciary.

If the Fight HST campaign wins the court case, then it goes to the legislative committee, where a whole different can of worms gets opened up.

Jordan Bateman at Langley Politics has some interesting speculation about Premier Gordon Campbell‘s future.

It should be pointed out that his term as premier began on June 5, 2001, so if you are part of the “10-year term” conspiracy theory group, a potential resignation date would be June 5, 2011.

“Rounded off” resignation dates happen sometimes in politics; British Prime Minister Tony Blair‘s term of office was just over 10 years, starting on May 2, 1997 and going to June 27, 2007 with 3 majority governments. My favourite “rounded off” political resignation date was Russian President Boris Yeltsin‘s December 31, 1999 millennium surprise.

Politics is always full of surprises, and certainly this day of the announcement of the HST Initiative Petition result was one of them.

The summary is that Elections BC said that the petition met the signature requirements in all 85 electoral districts, but is holding back the legislation pending the court challenges that are ongoing.

My quick analysis is that this is the best possible result for the Fight HST campaign.

If the initiative was passed through the ordinary process (i.e. going to the standing committee responsible for reviewing such legislation), it would have to go through a very boring process before finally ending up in the legislature in first reading and then dying on the order paper. This is a very black and white process.

Instead, the acting Chief Electoral Officer, who is clearly stepping far beyond the boundaries of the mandate of the Recall and Initiative Act, is introducing an incredible amount of uncertainty in the process.

The PR backlash of “let the judiciary take control of the matter instead of letting 700,000 signatures have their voice” is self-writing.

In a sense, this result is the best possible outcome for the Fight HST campaign, and as long as the petition is deadlocked in the judicial system, it will continue to benefit the campaign.

If I was a BC Liberal MLA in certain ridings, I would start to feel very uncomfortable since the recall petition can be credibly linked to repealing the HST. The only salvation for these select MLAs is that now that the HST has been implemented the the world hasn’t ended in BC (other than the very high annoyance of having to pay an extra 7% on a lot of everyday things such as a coffee at Starbucks) the backlash might have died down somewhat.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010 is when Elections BC has to report whether the Initiative petition passes or not – this involves them validating the appropriate numbers of signatures in all 85 electoral districts.

The HST Initiative Campaign filed their financing report on time. A copy of report is linked here. They reported the following details:

Revenues – $117,737
Expenses – $108,912

Amusingly, page 3 of the report has an error, where all the values in the first column (expenses subject to limit) should be on the second column (expenses not subject to limit) and vice versa. This does not change the substance of the report, mainly that they were well below the spending limit.

Of their expenses, they spent about $30,000 on “Convention, meeting fees and workshops”, $22,000 in media advertising (a drop in the bucket in the media world), $12,000 in printing (and another $3,400 printing petition sheets) and $13,000 on travel. The rest of the line items were less than $10,000. This was a surprisingly low-budget campaign given the numbers of signatures they claimed to have signed up – about 705,000. Another way of looking at this was 15.4 cents per signature, which any political party would empty their pockets and borrow money if they can get 1 vote for every 15 cents of advertising spending.

Note that some of these expenses represented “in kind” expenses, where there was a sponsor providing the appropriate services without cash remuneration – it just has to be booked as a revenue and expense. $26,400 was attributed to this.

On the revenue side, we have the following notable contributors (I chose $3,000 and above as an arbitrary cut-off point):

Council of Senior Citizens Organizations – $3,000
Family Funeral Home Association of BC – $10,000
BC Retired Teachers’ Association – $3,000
Canadian Auto Workers Local 111 – $5,250

The only item that is obvious is that there is a huge mix of contributors – individuals, corporations, unions, which is very unusual to see in BC politics!

Alex Tsakumis has yet another thought-provoking article on the short-term fate of the BC Liberals, mainly speculating that Premier Gordon Campbell will step down to take a federal appointment in Autumn 2010 or Spring 2011.

… also …

… so that leaves Carole James and crew, that blew the last election with the most insanely milquetoast strategy of ‘sit ‘n wait’, I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t until the debate that Carole got going and by then she had already been defined by the Liberals as an uninspiring, bland meanderer.

This is a good summary of the last election. The Premier had a horrible debate and Carole James was able to get under his skin, but by then it was already too late. The wishy-washy nature of the NDP’s attacks on the carbon tax also undermined their campaign and probably cost them a couple seats. The nature of the present legislature would have changed considerably if the BC Liberals had a 44/40/1 majority instead of the present 48/35/2 situation.

The NDP had a “Rapid Responder” which surprisingly addressed a fiscal issue – accruals for forest fires. Normally with the NDP you can blow away their arguments when they get on budgetary and/or fiscal matters, but they got this one correct.

Forest fires in BC are very expensive to fight. Because they are in remote areas, require huge amounts of labour (which has a lot of it to be paid out at overtime), and require all the logistical support (feeding, lodging) in the remote areas, plus aircraft, the expenses add up significantly. If you know anybody that has done this sort of work, just ask them about the logistics and the (very hard) work involved – it is a miniature military operation to arrange.

Over the past 9 years (2001 to 2009) the government has averaged $155.8 million in forest fire actual expenses, while in the same time period the government has averaged $59.6 million budgeted.

The reason why they low-ball the estimates is two-fold: the main reason (political) is because it makes the “headline number” of the budget look better (lower deficit or higher surplus), but the second (non-political) reason is that the expenditure cannot be accurately estimated from a year-to-year basis. Instead, a baseline case is estimated and they pick that number, hoping that there aren’t any catastrophic events. It is clear, however, that they have been low-balling the numbers and a more reasonable estimate assuming the relevant policies are not changing would be around $100 million higher than what they are budgeting currently.

So in this respect, the NDP is correct and the government should be a little more responsible with their estimates on forest fire expenditures.

The number is also high enough that it makes you wonder whether fighting all of these fires is necessary – specifically how many fires are being fought because they threaten residential areas, versus the loss of the economic value of timber.

The forest fire budgeted number is modified during the interim reports to better reflect the year’s progress, but this revision does not have the headline impact in terms of the deficit/surplus number that the initial budget has. In any case, the government needs to provide a better accrual on the forest fire budget estimate. At the very least it would be a more conservative form of accounting.

A note on spin – in the NDP’s email release, they incorporated 2001 to 2010, while in their web link, they incorporated 2003 to 2010. 2001 and 2002 spent less money than budgeted, which in theory makes the government look “good”. When looking at a statistical baseline, it is a very common political trick (of all stripes) to perform very selective range bounding to make the numbers look better or worse depending on the message you want to be delivering.