The following appeared in this morning's Vancouver Sun. It was written by Hamish Marshall, the campaign manager for the CTF's No TransLink Tax campaign and president of Torch.agency.

I told a friend in December I was running the No side in the TransLink plebiscite. Impeccably connected with Vancouver’s government and business communities, he told me I was making a big mistake, the result would be 80 per cent for the Yes side, and I would embarrass myself and damage my polling business. Everyone he knew was supporting the Yes campaign, and TransLink and the municipal governments planned to spend millions to generate the result they wanted.

All the No side had was a website, a few thousand dollars donated by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and our secret weapon, Jordan Bateman. Insights West released on Dec. 15 its first poll: among decided voters, 57 per cent were voting Yes and only 43 per cent were planning to vote No.

Bateman and I had a plan of attack ready. On principle, we opposed the TransLink tax because we believed TransLink’s problem wasn’t lack of revenue but terrible management. We also knew municipal governments across our region kept collecting more property tax but never directed any of it to transit. Instead of making tough choices with their budgets, the TransLink mayors wanted to take more money out of the pockets of people living in one of the most expensive places in North America.

We developed both an offensive message — that TransLink couldn’t be trusted with any more of your money — and a defensive one, that the proposed plan could be paid for with savings from wasteful municipal governments.

We came out swinging after Christmas with our messages. We released examples of TransLink waste every day. We named TransLink CEO Ian Jarvis the Face of the Waste because he made more than any other transit system CEO and even the prime minister.

We also released a detailed, 73-page, accountant-written financial plan showing how the entire proposed transit expansion could be funded if municipalities simply dedicated a fraction of expected growth in tax revenues each year to transit. No one was able to attack our plan on the numbers; it was a strong push back to the mayors’ message that a new tax was the only way to pay for more buses and subways.

People responded well and started registering on our website, interacting with our Facebook group and donating money. The vast majority of donations were under $200. In the end, we raised $39,687.95.

We realized in early January we had the Yes side rattled. They started attacking Bateman personally. Every day, he was assailed on Twitter and by Yes side people. I told him this was a great sign: if this referendum was about who the voters hated more, TransLink or Jordan Bateman, we would win every time.

At about the same time, the Yes side launched the Better Transit and Transportation Coalition, which eventually grew to include 145 groups ranging from big unions to the Vancouver Board of Trade and the Suzuki Foundation. Everyone who was anyone was involved and it became a group of elites telling every-day folks what to think.

Bateman was attacked for being the only guy opposed to this tax, so we rolled out representatives for the Chinese and Punjabi language media, and released supportive op-eds by other people. On balance these attacks helped us, making the David-and-Goliath struggle all the more real in the eyes of the voters.

The Yes side gave us on Feb. 11 our biggest break. They fired Jarvis, but kept paying his salary. This proved what we had been saying was true, that TransLink was mismanaged. They did it again less than a month later, promising that a billionaire would look over the books, further proof TransLink couldn’t be trusted to manage your money. The Yes side was proving our core message.

We kept pushing our simple message in the media and using traditional grassroots methods. We deployed 700 lawn signs and were rewarded by ham-fisted municipal officials confiscating them, generating more sympathetic coverage. We had volunteers hand deliver thousands of flyers and even had a crowd-funded plane tow a No TransLink Tax banner over the Vancouver Marathon.

The results speak for themselves: 62 per cent voted No, including majorities in supposed Yes strongholds Vancouver and New Westminster. We won by producing straight-forward messages that connected with what voters thought themselves about TransLink and their tax burden.