Dear editor,

Does Don McRae have bats in his belfry?

Does he have nothing better to do than to make allegations? Please allow me to try to teach him another brief lesson.

Petition organizers are required by law to include a tally of actual signatures on petitions when they send them to Elections BC. During the petition period against the HST, it is a fact that Comox Valley canvassers collected 12,051 signatures, so that鈥檚 what we reported.

Then 838 additional Comox Valley signatures were reported to Elections BC from other ridings. We didn鈥檛 know about those extra signatures until Anton Boegman, assistant chief electoral officer, notified us of that fact on Jan. 24.

So, in fact, we should have said on our recall statement that we had collected 12,888 signatures.

It is also a fact that the anti-HST petition organizers did not have access to the voters list, so there was no way to know if a person was entitled to sign the petition. We only had a person鈥檚 word for it. If someone other than the signer made any marks on the petition sheet (such as a spelling correction by the canvasser, for example) then that entry would not be verified.

If a voter entered a new address but had not notified Elections BC, their signature would not count. If they signed on another riding sheet in error (North Island or Alberni, for example), then their signature would not count. If they misunderstood that this was not merely a protest petition but a legal Elections BC petition, they may have signed the petition more than once.

One police officer told me she had already signed three times! She had no idea about the difference between legal petitions and protest petitions! She was quite embarrassed.

In the end, Elections BC disallowed 2,673 signatures, or 5.6 per cent. Some of those, as explained above, could have been bona fide voters. Some may have been duplicates. Some were, no doubt, people who believed in the anti-HST movement and signed even though they were not registered to vote in the Comox Valley.

However you look at it, between 21 and 27 per cent of people in the Comox Valley expressed their dislike of the way the HST was sprung on taxpayers, or the increased costs of those items which were previously exempt from the seven per cent PST, or the arrogance of an MLA who continued to parrot his party鈥檚 line that 鈥渢he HST is good for you so just get over it.鈥�

Allow me to clarify the facts once more for Don McRae and your readers. There will be a test.

鈥� 12, 888 people signed the Comox Valley petition against the HST, either here or elsewhere.

鈥� 10, 215 of those names were verified by Elections BC from their data base.

鈥� Don McRae will not listen so we want to employ a different person to represent us.

鈥� We are Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats, Greens, members of other political parties and people with no political affiliations.

鈥� We do not harass or intimidate voters.

鈥� There are no lies coming from this organization. We rely on facts.

Kathryn Askew

Editor鈥檚 note: Kathryn Askew is the proponent for Comox Valley Recall.