Here's another shocker for you: the Fraser Institute thinks taxes are too high.
The Vancouver-based right-wing think tank's regular screeds are so predictable that you generally don't even need to know the subject to know what the conclusion will be: private sector good, public sector bad. Orwell would have been proud.
This time, the Fraser Institute is setting its sights not on the provincial or federal governments, but on the local level. Its latest report, dutifully reported in the Vancouver papers, shows that B.C. has the biggest imbalance in Canada between property tax rates for business and industry -especially the resource industry - and taxes for homeowners.
Fair enough. We've said before in this space that our local government has to be careful about relying too heavily on its major industrial clients like Woodfibre, which currently pays nearly $2 million a year in property taxes to the District of Squamish despite receiving next to no municipal services.
But we can't accept the inferred conclusion that businesses and industry should be paying exactly the same kind of rates as residents.
For starters, it doesn't take into account what proportion property taxes actually represent for businesses compared to residents. A homeowner making $50,000 a year living in a $300,000 home (an average-priced single-family home in Squamish) pays about $2,000 a year in property taxes - about four per cent of gross income.
By comparison, a business that pulls in about $1 million a year in revenue in commercial premises might pay about $5,000 a year - less than half of one per cent of its gross annual income.
What the Fraser Institute also doesn't calculate is how the amount of property tax municipalities collect from heavy industry stacks up to the profits those companies have gleaned decade after decade from public lands.
Setting up processing industries in communities near the working forest and allowing those communities to tax them was part of the quid pro quo industry got for its cheap access to public land and the resources on them.
Now, of course, those industries are pulling up stakes from the communities that hosted them - like Interfor, which will finally pull the plug on its Squamish Lumber Division sawmill next month. Yet their access to the province's public resources in the area remains.
Keeping a balance between industrial, commercial and residential taxes is essential - not just to be competitive and attractive to business and industry, but to buffer residents against any nasty shocks if a major industrial taxpayer suddenly disappears from the scene.
But heavy industry and business do have to shoulder their share of the burden.
