VICTORIA – Let’s start the fall political season with an outrageous prediction.

The next premier of B.C. is a former military intelligence officer whose aboriginal-relations experience includes stints with Indian Affairs, the Nisga’a Task Group and the Lower Mainland Treaty Advisory Committee.

A few keen observers of B.C. politics will have guessed that I refer to Delta South independent MLA Vicki Huntington. Make that Victoria Huntington, for if this prediction takes shape, she will find herself surrounded by image polishers picking her clothes and phrases with great care.

A (federal, progressive) Conservative who spurned the hillbilly feud that is the tiny B.C. Conservative Party, Huntington suddenly has a future so bright she has to wear shades.

She arrives at the B.C. legislature with a gale-force wind at her back, in the form of harmonized sales tax protests howling into her constituency office. B.C. Liberal blood has barely dried on her sword after her deep wounding of the beast in Delta South. Now Premier Gordon Campbell is limping on both sides, perhaps sitting bolt upright at night to exclaim that the HST was “not on my radar!”

I sat down with Huntington last week in her sun-filled office near the legislature rotunda, and found her relaxed when confronted with a single reporter. (She approaches our infamous scrums as if they were packs of dogs, but then so does Campbell.)

She took over former B.C. Liberal MLA Val Roddick’s constituency office and phone number, and that phone hasn’t rung so much since Roddick was trying to justify downgrading the local hospital. 

I put it to her squarely. You’re a conservative, this is a consumption tax, and just about every grown-up country in the world now has one. Are you for it or agin’ it?

“The press wants to know if I’m for it or agin’ it,” she replies smoothly, leaving herself wiggle room. “The public want me to know they expect me to be agin’ it.”

One can imagine the torches-and-pitchforks scene in poor persecuted Ladner and Tsawwassen if Huntington breathed a word in defense of the Hated Sales Tax right now. She nods to the sound economic theory behind it, but quickly adds that recession-battered big industries won’t be passing on tax savings to consumers any time soon.

(This is a poor argument, especially as it relates to lumber or copper, but that’s another column.)

“The only way I would vote in favour is if they dropped the provincial portion of the harmonized tax substantially, so that it came out at nine or 10 per cent combined,” Huntington says.

That’s not going to happen this year, or next year. But by 2012 an upstart party, let’s call it the B.C. Alliance, could make it a powerful wedge to widen the cracks in the B.C. Liberal coalition.

It’s worth remembering why Campbell saddled up against the Nisga’a treaty back in the late ’90s. Was it because he truly believed aboriginal people should be assimilated? No. In fact his radical shift the other way, the Reconciliation and Recognition Act, was formally declared dead on Friday, fulfilling another bold prediction of this column in June.

The real reason Campbell, Mike de Jong and Geoff Plant are still derisively referred to by some chiefs as “professional Indian fighters” is that they were playing cowboy to herd the shattered Social Credit coalition back to the corral.

They pulled it off, but now ex-B.C. Reform sheriff Richard Neufeld growls in the Senate.

It would take eight B.C. Liberals to vote against a government budget and begin a real seismic shift.