Business tax won’t be going anytime soon, candidates say
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/09/2010 (5482 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
ANYONE hoping to see the backside of the city’s business tax will be disappointed in 2011, regardless of who’s elected mayor of Winnipeg.
Mayoral challenger Judy Wasylycia-Leis told a group of business owners on Monday this city can not afford to eliminate the business tax because the city desperately needs the $57.6 million it derives from the levy.
Incumbent Mayor Sam Katz said he still wants to eliminate the tax as he promised in 2004, but does not believe that will be possible anytime soon.
Speaking at a Fort Garry Hotel mayoral forum hosted by the Winnipeg BIZ Association, Wasylycia-Leis promised to freeze the pool of cash collected from business taxes, as Katz has done the past two years. In 2009 and 2010, the city shifted the business-tax burden onto larger companies by exempting the 4,400 smallest businesses in Winnipeg — roughly 36 per cent of the city’s businesses — from paying the levy.
Eliminating the business tax is not feasible right now because the city faces a possible operating deficit in addition to a $3.7-billion infrastructure deficit, Wasylycia-Leis said.
“We don’t have the flexibility right now to reduce taxes,” said the former Winnipeg North MP.
Katz appeared to agree, even as he reaffirmed his desire to eliminate what he has called “the job-killing business tax” for six years. He has reduced the business-tax rate from 9.75 per cent to 7.75 per cent over the past six years.
He also struck a committee and commissioned a report about ways to eliminate the business tax, but the levy remains.
Along with crime, the city’s revenue troubles have become one of the themes of the 2010 mayoral campaign. Wasylycia-Leis has promised to raise property taxes two per cent a year for four years, while Katz has skewered that promise as a regressive measure.
On Monday, the small-C conservative mayor said the former NDP MP’s taxation policy would harm Winnipeg’s most vulnerable citizens.
“When you increase property taxes by one or two per cent, you’re forgetting about the working poor who are on the bubble, or seniors who are on fixed incomes,” Katz said.
Wasylycia-Leis called that position preposterous, claiming property taxes are less regressive than consumption taxes. Katz wants the province to devote one percentage point of provincial sales tax proceeds to the city.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca