Fair Taxes Are In The Eye Of The Beholder: WHOPPER WATCH
“Imagine if you, as a property owner, could decide how much you pay in property taxes every year. That’s exactly what the federal government gets to do. They decide how much their property is worth and what tax rate they pay.”
Mayor Mark Sutcliffe on federal payments-in-lieu
Imagine if you, as the city government, could decide what is fair about the money it receives from the federal government. That’s exactly what the city government gets to do. They decide unilaterally what is fair.
Ken Gray
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
Doesn’t the Mayor know that the formula to calculate PILs that the feds pay to the City is negotiated & agreed to by the feds & City? It is not imposed.
Alex:
I think he probably does know but that’s not the point. He’s got a problem and the truth might get into the way of solving it.
cheers
kgray
Not sure how fair it is that the Province pays “tax” on its universities, hospitals, prisons and other institutions based on a structure called “beds and heads”. Under this payment structure, the Province pays $75 for each bed or head in an institution. For example, in the case of Carleton University with around 31,000 students, the Province would pay about $2.33 million when the university property with land and buildings is probably worth a couple of billion dollars. And by the way, the $75 per head or bed hasn’t gone up in value since it was first set in 1987. In 2018 the Jules Leger Centre, a former high school and now a specialized provincial education facility for those with learning disabilities located in the Westboro Beach area paid $3,750 in “taxes” (based on 50 students) which was probably substantially less than most private residences in the neighbourhood. Given that the $75 hasn’t risen in almost 40 years, I don’t think there is much room for the City to negotiate under this program or every city in the province is an extremely poor negotiator. Even under PILT, whatever limited negotiation may be possible, ultimately the Federal government can decide what it wants to pay/thinks is appropriate and if the City doesn’t like it, their only recourse is the courts.
Interesting how a set-up that’s been in place for years and years has suddenly become “unfair” when Sutcliffe, Council and the administration need a distraction from a desperate financial situation that did not develop overnight and in the shadow of huge financial settlements they are making (have made?) with contractors involved in the LRT construction.
Are we to understand that the budget numbers they’ve been putting forward all these years are not valid? If we, as taxpayers, have been paying more than our fair share, why are they only telling us now? Can we recalculate our tax bills for the past X years and apply for a refund if they’ve been over-taxing us? If they’ve known all along that the numbers were wrong, they should have been dealing with it then and charging us fairly. Speaking of fairness …