As recall faltered in Kamloops-North Thompson earlier this year, local organizer Chat Moats rebuffed requests from Elections B.C. to return the completed petition sheets to close the book on the campaign.
Instead, with reporters looking on, he fed the estimated 1,000 petition sheets into a shredder, in effect thumbing his nose at the independent watchdog on the electoral process.
Sending in the sheets would be "redundant," he told reporter Cam Fortems of the Kamloops Daily News. The campaign hadn't gathered enough signatures to oust B.C. Liberal MLA Terry Lake.
Besides, he didn't want to pay for couriering the pages to Victoria. Nor was he prepared to take the trouble to drive them there himself.
He also expressed concern about the privacy of those who'd signed the petition, never mind that provincial law explicitly requires that the petition be public to discourage any abuse of process.
The legislation also says that "a recall petition must be submitted to the chief electoral officer within 60 days after the date on which the petition was issued." The accompanying regulations say much the same thing: "The proponent must submit all of the pages of the completed petition to the chief electoral officer within 60 days of the day on which the petition was issued."
But in the legal interpretation of the proponent -that's Moats -those requirements would only apply in cases where the petition had gathered enough signatures for validation, about 15,000 in this instance. In short, only successful petitions had to be submitted to Elections B.C. This one was a failure.
Failed or not, Moats continued to insist that he'd crossed a symbolic threshold by gathering 10,087 signatures, about 200 more names than the number of people who voted for Lake in the last election. A "moral victory," in other words.
Based on Moats's claim, he presided over a more productive campaign than either of the other major attempts to recall B.C. Liberals.
In Oak Bay-Gordon Head, a higher profile campaign in a concentrated urban riding, there was a large contingent of canvassers, almost 300. Together they gathered almost 9,000 signatures, an average of 30 apiece.
In Comox Valley, there were only half as many canvassers in a larger riding, and they pulled in about 5,000 names, a bit better pace than Oak Bay.
Moats, by comparison, managed to register only 100 canvassers to cover a much larger riding. Yet he says the smaller team gathered more signatures than either of the others -about three times as many on a proportional basis.
Not that there's any way to check his claim independently. For at Moats's discretion, the petition was consigned to the shredder on April 4, the day he'd been asked to deliver the pages to Elections B.C.
After some back and forth with the election watchdog, I gather he has agreed to sign a statutory declaration as to the disposition of the petition.
Elections B.C., for its part, has recommended to the government that the wording of the law be tightened and a penalty section added to prevent any future recall proponent from treating the product of an electoral process as a personal trophy, to dispose of as he or she sees fit.
