Legault says no to Plante’s fiscal demands
Valérie Plante has been spearheading a movement by Quebec’s mayors to reform the funding of towns so they’re not so entirely dependent on property tax. François Legault is not interested in complying, and has his minister of municipal affairs airily tell the towns that they already have the means to diversify their revenue.
carswell 12:33 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
Legault is interested only in expanding the provincial government’s (i.e. his) power, not in decentralizing or sharing it. And that’s doubly true when it comes to evil cities, especially ones filled with non-Québécois and non-francophones, which, in the nationalist worldview, must be kept on a very short leash.
Nicholas 13:12 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
I don’t understand this push by cities to try to get other tax authority. Just raise property taxes! Montreal’s residential property tax rate (including school taxes) is, depending on the borough, around 0.8% of the property value. It’s one of the lowest rates in the province and the country, sometimes by a lot. The average US rate is 1%, and it’s generally higher in global cities I just checked. City+state sales taxes in the US are generally lower than sales taxes we pay in Quebec, so it’s not like they’re making the revenue up elsewhere. Montreal does have a higher rate than Toronto, Calgary and most of BC, but not by much for the first two, and Toronto is crying poor too now. I know not everything is directly comparable based on different levels of governmental responsibility in different areas, but we provide a lot of services and yet have lower tax rates even though that’s our main revenue source.
Property taxes are some of the most efficient taxes out there, just behind land value taxes (similar but where you only tax the unimproved value of the land, not the value of the buildings on it). They’re easy to administer and hard to avoid. The new revenue will have to come from elsewhere, and we’ll have to pay either way; do we want to be paying more every time we buy something or request a permit? If the city needs more revenue, they can justify it; if they can’t justify it, they shouldn’t try to get it another way or blame the province.
carswell 13:45 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
Isn’t a downside of higher property taxes that it makes buying a home even more inaccessible for first-time buyers? It also doesn’t tax (except in very indirect ways) people who frequent the city and use its services but don’t live in it.
Anton 14:47 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
It creates incentives for the populace to vote for depressing the property values.
Ephraim 16:39 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
I would think that even within the property tax system there are ways to change how things are done. For example, the rate for residential use, should require some sort of proof that it is a primary residence, the same way that the city requires proof to get a parking permit. And the same can be done with rentals. But maybe there should be a different rate of tax of a pied-a-terre, a foreigner that doesn’t live there and even properties that are vacant.
Michael 17:46 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
Maybe she can learn to lower employee head count instead of looking for ways to just tax the population more?
Kate 17:56 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
Michael, if you cut the number of city employees, soon you’ll start hearing complaints about deteriorating services. I don’t see a lot of complaints about too many people working for the city or the boroughs.
Michael 20:50 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
My cousin is a tech worker that works for the government (work from home) that also does another work from home job collecting 2 paychecks. He says his government job takes him 3 hours to do tops and gets paid an 8 hour day for it. Beautiful.
Time to do a complete hiring freeze for years.
Kate 21:23 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
OK Michael, you’re one of those right wing guys who thinks less government is necessarily better, down to cutting back on garbagemen. We get it.
This is a big city. It takes a lot of hands to keep it clean and safe and running properly. Cutting down on hiring is not the answer. Quebec needs to readjust its relationship with Montreal, and with its cities generally, but it doesn’t like to give up power, so it won’t.
Plante is right that a lot of the adjustments needed to meet climate change have to be tackled by cities, and they need the money. This isn’t a weakness – it’s a permanent structural shift that will affect everything in our lives in coming years. The city needs more resources and she’s right to fight for them.
Kevin 22:15 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
There could be a lot more efficiencies, but a lot of the wastage is caused by overlapping jurisdictions.
And when you do automate stuff you get a lot of GIGO, like the woman getting a bill for $0.01.
Kate 23:17 on 2023-09-07 Permalink
Kevin’s referring to this recent story. Obviously the bookkeeping script ought to include code to cancel any bill under $1, but it doesn’t. Any bill that doesn’t even cover the postage ought to be dropped.
Ian 08:43 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
@Michael ah yes. the old “I know a guy who scams the system therefore everyone scams the system therefore teh system is broken”.
No, Michael, your cousin is committing fraud.
walkerp 09:12 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
Your “cousin” lol.
But in the private sector, nobody ever wastes time or takes advantage of their employer’s inefficiencies.
Michael 09:32 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
If it takes 3-4 hours for my cousin to complete his work, so are other government employees sitting around doing 3-4 hours of work, there is a lot more hours in the day they can work if we do a hiring freeze.
But no, the only answer for the government is as expected = raise taxes.
Michael 09:34 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
An easy example: the mountains of police officers sitting around doing nothing in their cars. I’m sure we can do a hiring freeze there and save a lot money.
PatrickC 09:37 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
Property tax comparisons can be misleading if associated taxes/fees are not taken into account. I’m thinking of water and sanitation taxes, for example. Then there are the bonds that US counties and cities vote on for specific purposes and that are added to the property tax. The rules about these vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, of course.
Uatu 10:32 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
The health care system cut a lot of positions for cost savings. So how’s that working out? 😛
Tim 11:20 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
@Uatu: can you provide any evidence of the “cuts” that you reference? The health care system does not have enough employees. I recall reading about lots of people leaving the system. I believe that there are lots of open positions waiting to be filled. I do not recall any “cuts” being done for cost savings.
carswell 12:09 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
Can’t cite chapter and verse without spending time I don’t have right now to research, Tim, but the decline of the Quebec health care system began in the 1980s, when the PQ government (I believe) imposed massive “cost-saving” cuts. One of our more knowledgeable correspondents will probably provide details.
Tim S. 15:54 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
“In June 1995, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) became one of the Montreal-area acute-care hospitals to be slated for closure in response to a directive from the provincial government to cut the costs of health care provision.”
https://www.qehc.org/news/qehcs-history-at-a-glance
From the British Medical Journal (1999):
“Since 1994, 10 Quebec hospitals have been closed and about 16000 health professionals, including many doctors, have taken early retirement. ”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1115019/
Tim 16:32 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
Thanks Tim S and carswell. Certainly there was a lot of belt tightening 25 or 30 years ago in the 90’s. It also does not help that government reduced admissions to med schools across the country at that time due to a perceived surplus (https://secure.cihi.ca/free_products/chanjun02.pdf).
Kate 17:16 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
I don’t remember what year it was, but at some point in the 1990s the PQ government made offers that convinced a lot of nurses and teachers to retire early. My landlady at the time was a teacher, and she took the offer and went and tried to operate a B&B in a country town. (She was a hostile person at best and did not make a success of being a host, which didn’t surprise me at all – but that’s another story.)
Anyway, the upshot was a shitshow, because when all these workers – mostly women – clocked off, all of a sudden Quebec lost a vast amount of accrued knowledge and experience, and is arguably still suffering from it. But I don’t have any links.
(Looking for links I find that, a year ago, the current PQ leader was trying to push retired people to go back to work.)
Uatu 17:52 on 2023-09-08 Permalink
I work at the MUHC and have seen the job closures over the years. I’ve lost count at how many times that my position was closed due to budget cuts.
This was what was going on pre pandemic:
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/mobile/axe-swings-at-muhc-as-164-jobs-eliminated-1.1221928?cache=%2F7.633504%2F7.639697%2F7.633504
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/muhc-staff-cuts-1.4043329
Needless to say that when retirement was available those that could take it did. Not only because they were tired and overworked, but as a “f-ck you” to their bosses. I can’t tell you how many retirement parties I’ve been to where that was the overall sentiment.
dhomas 09:08 on 2023-09-09 Permalink
@Michael: I have a colleague that works with me. We work for a private company. He also works for another private company. At the other job, he works about 2 hours a day and gets 8 hours paid. I guess we should just abolish all private companies because people are scamming them?
CE 11:50 on 2023-09-09 Permalink
When workers can do their job efficiently and work multiple jobs at once to increase income it gets called « time theft » or a scam. When a CEO runs multiple companies at once, they make millions or billions of dollars and get called geniuses or are at least praised for their ability to multi task.
Orr 16:40 on 2023-09-09 Permalink
>>>(Looking for links I find that, a year ago, the current PQ leader was trying to push retired people to go back to work.)
I’d go back to work part time bc retired but the gov’t has never communicated this as a possibility, or even where to go for more information about incentive programs. It’s like they don’t want me to go back to work.