Vaughn Palmer: Activist Chris Delaney joins Kerry-Lynne Findlay's Conservative team

Chris Delaney and former Premier Bill Vander Zalm, seen together in 2011, successfully fought Gordon Campbell's HST. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG

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VICTORIA — B.C. Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay made her first major appointment this week, naming Chris Delaney as her chief of staff in her inner political circle.

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Delaney is a well-travelled veteran of right-of-centre politics in the province, including a stint as deputy leader of an earlier version of the B.C. Conservatives. He ran for the party in the 2009 election, garnering 2,000 votes (nine per cent) in Penticton.

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He also had stopovers in Reform B.C., B.C. First and the Unity Party, the latter an anti-abortion vehicle he led in the 2001 provincial election.

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“Not to be confused with B.C. United,” as Delaney emphasized in announcing to Conservative MLAs and staffers that he had taken the job Wednesday.

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“Kerry and I have been friends for 40 years,” he went on to say. “I have a background in film and TV animation, video games, and I own a tree farm in the B.C. Interior. I am also a businessman with interests in property development. I live in Barriere, B.C.”

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Delaney is an acolyte of former Premier Bill Vander Zalm — although “acolyte” doesn’t fully capture his enthusiasm for the premier who was forced from office in 1991 for violating conflict of interest guidelines.

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Here’s Delaney in his capacity as president of Reform B.C., introducing Vander Zalm as the party candidate in a 1999 byelection in Delta South:

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“We heard this voice when Abraham Lincoln accepted the call to free the slaves by speaking the truth. We heard this voice when Mahatma Gandhi led his people out from under the tyranny of an imperial conqueror. We heard this voice when Martin Luther King confounded the enemies of justice.”

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“Today, right here in B.C., the voice of a leader has emerged. I thank God for sending us a man who is prepared to speak the truth. I thank God for sending us a great leader. I thank God for Bill Vander Zalm.”

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Vander Zalm finished with 33 per cent to B.C. Liberal Val Roddick, who won with 60 per cent.

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But as the never-shy-about-blowing-his-own-horn Vander Zalm once said, “Jesus would have been low in the polls too.”

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Delaney and Vander Zalm both had a second act in B.C. politics, gifted by B.C. Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell.

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In July 2009, Campbell introduced the harmonized sales tax (HST), combining the seven per cent provincial sales tax with the five per cent federal goods and services tax into a value-added tax, on the European model.

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This was a mere 10 weeks after a provincial election in which the Liberals barely mentioned the HST, and then only as something that was not on the radar screen.

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The public backlash was immediate, ferocious and lasting.

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Vander Zalm and Delaney emerged as leaders of the anti-HST campaign along with Bill Tieleman, a left-of-centre communications strategist who had served as press secretary to NDP Premier Glen Clark.