Municipalities

Big municipal tax shift a great deal for business

Nov 7, 2010
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Municipal spending and municipal taxes are amongst the lowest in Canada. KPMG says businesses in Vancouver have the lowest business taxes amongst 41 cities they studied. So how come the pressure keeps coming to shift property taxes away from business and on to residential taxpayers?… View Article

Off the Highway by Mette Bach: politics and memoir

Jun 8, 2010
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Another suggestion for summer reading: brand new from local publisher New Star Books: Off the Highway by Mette Bach, a short (about 80 pages) memoir of her childhood and adolescence in North Delta. Bach weaves together personal recollections, history and social commentary to create a quirky, funny, depressing picture of a little-known Vancouver suburb. Regular… View Article

Victoria’s billion dollar P3 decision

Mar 16, 2010
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On March 24th the Victoria area’s Capital Regional District (CRD) is going to make a billion dollar decision.  The province has ordered the CRD to end its controversial practice of pumping raw sewage into the ocean.  But it has also ordered the CRD to consider using a public private partnership (P3) for the project. Regardless… View Article

Corporations are people too

Jan 31, 2010
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Advocates of democratic electoral reform are really out of step. Ideas like proportional representation and advertising spending limits are so retro, so 2004. The fashionable electoral reform idea this year is to give corporations a real say. It’s time for individual citizens to share their electoral democracy with corporations to give meaning to those old… View Article

The business elite’s parking tax backlash

Jan 8, 2010
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The media is reporting a “backlash” against the new parking tax in Vancouver.  The Vancouver Sun reports it is a “slickly organized” backlash being run by Vancouver’s business elite.  This is apparently a 30 member business coalition including the Board of Trade. This is not the first time Vancouver’s business elite has gotten organized around… View Article

Vancouver City Budget Woes: Are the Cuts Really Necessary?

Dec 3, 2009
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In this round of municipal budgeting, the city of Vancouver finds itself in exactly the same predicament as the federal and provincial governments faced earlier in the year – projected revenues would not be sufficient to meet their rising expenditures. The big difference is that municipal governments are prohibited by law from running a deficit…. View Article

Property taxes: are major industries suffering?

Nov 3, 2009
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Businesses across Canada have been complaining about what they pay in property taxes, well, since there were property taxes.  But the issue in BC came into sharper definition in July when Catalyst Paper hand-delivered cheques to four municipalities that only covered 25% of their property tax bill.  Timberwest, Celgar and West Fraser Timber joined Catalyst… View Article