If there was a ref in charge of the fight between the B.C. government and the forces opposing its harmonized sales tax, it would have been stopped by now.
When someone is being utterly and completely annihilated by an opponent, intervening is the right thing to do. Except in the one-sided dispute over the HST, no one has. The government refuses to throw in the towel so the fight carries on.
While this may be a PR battle it was never going to win, there was more the government could have done to better prepare for it, more it could have done once it became obvious the anti-HST forces were winning the hearts and minds of the public.
Consider some of the ways the government completely mismanaged this issue.
Finance Minister Colin Hansen told me this week that the original plan was to start educating British Columbians about the benefits of the tax in the spring of 2010 - 10 months after it had been announced. The government thought there was no point trying to talk about it any earlier when the public was thinking about Christmas and the Olympics.
Rather, it felt people would be more likely to read a pamphlet about the tax when the debate around it was likely to be at its apex - in the late spring, as the July 1 implementation date for the HST closed in.
But former Social Credit premier Bill Vander Zalm didn't wait until then to ignite a grassroots rebellion against the tax. He would get the names of more than 800,000 British Columbians on a petition demanding the HST be repealed. By waiting, the government allowed its political opponents to set the agenda and it came at a huge cost.
It takes much more effort to try to change people's minds than it does to help them form first impressions.
Mr. Hansen suffered a huge setback when Elections BC ruled that a pro-HST mail-out the government was planning to send to all British Columbians in May contravened provincial regulations. The electoral body said the pamphlet was an attempt to influence the outcome of a petition - which it was.
And no one in government had thought of this?
That ruling came to symbolize, in many ways, the idiocy of the government's move to wait until spring to begin campaigning for a tax it knew from its first unveiling would be unpopular.
And in that regard, Premier Gordon Campbell's decision not to take a personal role in trying to sell the tax from the moment it was announced was another colossal blunder. It's well known that the Premier likes to primarily attend announcements that cast him in a positive light. Attending town-hall meetings last fall to explain the tax would not have been fun.
But that's what he should have been doing instead of trying to worm his way into every Olympic photo-op that he could.
Finally, when the government was told it wasn't going to be able to sell the public on the merits of the HST through a newsletter, it needed the media more than ever to tell its side of the story.
That was always going to be a problem.
Mr. Vander Zalm can quickly rhyme off the items that will cost consumers more under the HST - his prime beef with the tax. He has honed his diatribe down to a scintillating 30-second sound bite.
Explaining why B.C. will come out further ahead with the HST makes for horrible television. It takes charts and graphs and boring, ratings-killing appearances by economists looking into a camera and talking about marginal taxation rates.
What TV and most media love is confrontation, and so the vast tenor of the coverage of the HST has focused on the overarching battle between the two sides and not the intricacies of the issue itself.
Newspapers have done the best job of explaining the government's hard-to-explain position. But even they can't be expected to provide an in-depth examination of the perceived benefits of a tax every time they report on it - it would take up too much space.
Which gives the side with the simpler tale to tell the clear advantage.
But the biggest thing hurting the government is the widespread perception that it lied to the people about the HST. That is the single biggest weapon the opposing forces now have against Mr. Campbell, and the Premier hasn't found a way to convince people otherwise.
I doubt he ever will.