OSOYOOS TIMES-May 5, 2010

Election BC’s executive director of corporate planning and event management said it’s up to the people collecting signatures for the anti-HST Initiative Petition campaign to make sure that process is on the level.
In other words, Anton Boegman said, the signature collection campaign across the province is “trust based” and Elections BC is not really monitoring what’s happening in communities where volunteers have set up stations where people can sign their names to the petition.
Elections BC would only look into any problems with the campaign, he added, if complaints came in to the provincial body.
This seems like a dangerous situation.
The Initiative Petition effort, regardless of its merits, is a very important campaign.
Those collecting the signatures have an agenda, however, and to leave their efforts unchecked doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Having a volunteer who is obviously hoping to have as many people sign the petition as possible manning a signature collection station or canvassing people in the community is like having a member of a political party running a polling station on Election Day.
Yes, this is not an electoral process.
But without any sort of monitoring from Elections BC, such a volunteer would be free to push and pressure a person into making a decision he or she may not be completely informed about.
Boegman said Elections BC has already received at least one complaint about an individual being harassed in an effort to get them to sign the petition.
Could there be more people across the province who have been unfairly pressured into signing their name?
While volunteers with the petition campaign have been given Elections BC’s rules and guidelines for the process and several systems are in place to verify that those signatures collected are legitimate, not having an objective bystander monitoring an effort that can have serious implications for this province is a bad decision.
One wants to believe that those people spearheading the signature collection effort are all honourable people and, no doubt, the majority are.
But the HST is a subject that has stirred up people’s passions across the province and it’s just as likely that there are some out there that will go to any length to get people to sign the petition.
Volunteers still have two months to collect signatures and it would be prudent of Elections BC or some other objective body to keep a closer eye on the campaign.