British Columbia

Appeals to continue, tax group vows

A Vancouver citizens committee will
continue assisting residential property
owners facing astronomical assessment
hikes, even though city council tumed down
a motion to launch a city-backed mass ap-
peal, the group’s spokesperson declared
Thursday.

“In rejecting this motion they contra-
dicted themselves in the most fundamental
way,” Bruce Yorke said of the aldermen and
mayor from the right-wing Non-Partisan
Association.

Yorke, addressing a hastily convened
press conference following rejection of the
motion in council’s finance committee, said
the city’s planned newspaper ads advising
residents to appeal their assessments is

meaningless without the city offering to as-

sist appellants through a difficult and poten-
tially costly process.

Ald. Harry Rankin of the Committee of
Progressive Electors moved that council
“make complaint” against the 1991-92
property assessment roll of the B.C. Assess-
ment Authority. He amended that motion
during debate to include assisting individual

residential property owners making appeals,
and to appeal rolls based on an area break-
down of the city.

But NPA aldermen were generally hos-
tile to the motion, which caused COPE Ald.
Libby Davies to comment that the issue was
Not partisan. “I take exception to the way
delegations have been treated here today,”
she said.

Yorke, representing the Lower Mainland
Committee for Fair Taxes and Assessments,
told the finance committee he had a 112-sig-
nature petition and had received 27 phone
calls from residents anxious about their

' property assessments, which could see city

property taxes skyrocket. ©

Yorke said the Assessment Act allows
several factors to determine property value,
but that the authority chooses to use “a very
volatile, unreal market place.”

Vancouver’s property values have soared
during about three years of intense real es-
tate speculation, much of it from offshore
interests. Two years ago the city’s west side
was slapped with high assessments, forcing
long-time residents to consider selling their

homes in the face of high taxes. Under pres-
sure, city council then capped property
taxes. This year, the east side is being hit.

Saying the average assessment hike will
likely be around 45 percent, Yorke criticized
the secretive way the authority analyzes
property values and stressed the difficulty
the average citizen has in launching an ap-
peal before the authority’s Court of
Revision.

But NPA aldermen defended the present
system, and questioned delegations —
which included Civic New Democrat coun-
cil candidates Ian Reid and David Levi, and
Vancouver and District Labour Council
secretary-treasurer John Fitzpatrick — as to
what alternatives they had in mind.

“I don’t like what’s going on, but I still
feel we’ve got nothing else to go by,” said
committee chair George Puil.

Rankin said the city has the expertise to

examine assessment methods and.come up
with a solution. “My hope is that this kind of
appeal would help us find out how this
works,” he said.

Davies said she saw Rankin’s motion as

This article was written before the Oct.
23 city council meeting, which unani-
~ mously adopted in principle the report of
city children’s advocate Rita Chudnovsky.
Some 40 delegations set to speak on the
report cheered the decision. Jean Swan-
son of End Legislated Poverty praised
council's action. The report must go back
to council for more detailed examination.

The World Summit for Children held
in New York recently was given some
truly shocking statistics about the welfare
of the world’s children. They are the
world’s most neglected resource. Health
spending in the past year declined in three
quarters of African and Latin American
countries. Infant mortality is still rising in
some countries.

Spending on schools declined as did
enrolment rates. Of the 100 million six-
year-olds who will enter school this year,
40 million will drop out before completing
their primary grades. Over two-thirds of
the children who won’t be going to school
or who will drop out will be female. Much
of this is due to the hard-hearted interna-
tional bankers (Canadians are prominent
among them) who demand that social
programs be cut in order that interest can
be paid on loans they made to developing
countries.

Canada has nothing to be smug about.
Almost one million Canadian children,
one out of every seven, live below the
poverty line. Deaths among Canada’s
aboriginal children are twice that of the
rest of the country. Welfare rates and the

keep a big section of people below the
poverty line, and now the Social Credit
government threatens to cut welfare rates
still further and to cut social programs by
five per cent.

The nations of the world have come up
with a “Convention on the Rights of the
Child” dealing with the survival, health,
education, and protection against abuse
and exploitation of children. Canada
signed this agreement but has not yet
ratified it because not all provinces have
agreed.

Prime Minister Mulroney chaired the
opening session of the World Summit for
Children with the usual platitudes. Does
he think that Canadians have forgotten the
promise he made just before the last

miserably low minimum wage in B.C..

Childcare must be a priority

federal election? He promised to spend $4
billion on a seven-year childcare program,
but as soon as he was elected he postponed
this indefinitely. It became one more bro-
ken Mulroney promise.

We have our problems in Vancouver
too. The comprehensive report of the
city’s children’s advocate submitted to
city council recently, was alarming. Just
consider these facts:

* The structure of Canadian families is
changing. Since the early 1980s the maj-
ority of Canadian mothers of pre-school
and elementary school-age children have
been employed outside the home. An in-
creasing number of these families is
headed by lone parents, overwhelming
female.

¢ Many, if not most, of Vancouver’s
children from birth to 12 years of age
require some form of non-parental child-

care for at least part of the day, but affor- _

dable childcare is not available to most.

j Harry
Rankin

Present delivery of childcare services in
Vancouver is in crisis. We have a critical
shortage of licensed childcare facilities.

* Many low and middle income parents
are unable to pay the high cost of child-
care. Parent fees are the sole source of
operating funds for childcare programs.
The high cost of childcare and lack of
stable funding results in lack of access for
families who require care, financial in-
stability for operators, unacceptably low
staff salaries and compromised quality of
programming.

e The average cost in Vancouver for
group daycare is $667 a month for infants,
$546 for toddlers, and $379 for 3-5 year
olds. For licensed family daycare the
average is a little lower — $444 for in-
fants, $422 for toddlers and $401 for 3-5
year olds.

* The key to quality care is consistent

"grants.

experienced staff, but because of low
wages there is a growing shortage of
trained care-givers and a high staff turn-
over.

e Only B.C. and Newfoundland do not
provide some form of direct operating

e Vancouver has 26,000 children in the
0-5 age group. Sixty per cent of women
whose youngest child is five or less is in
the paid labour force. Yet we have only
2,000 licensed group and family childcare
spaces for them.

¢ We have 7,000 children under 18
months of age, with only 145 licensed
spaces for them. .

The majority of Vancouver’s daycare
children is being cared for in unlicensed
settings. Under public pressure our Non-
Partisan-Association-dominated city
council has reluctantly agreed to upgrade
its support for daycare centres. But it is
still far from enough.

Actually, it is a responsibility that
should be borne by senior governments
who have all the resources of revenue in
their hands. The city’s major source is
property taxes. It may surprise some to
learn that no level of government in Can-
ada has a legislative mandate to develop,
implement and administer a comprehen-
sive childcare system.

That’s quite a commentary on our con-
cern, or rather lack of it, for children. To
make matters worse, Prime Minister Mul-
roney and Finance Minister Wilson have
even callously refused to exempt child
care from the Goods and Services Tax they
are trying to force on us.

Experience all over the United States
and Canada indicates that non-profit
societies provide the best childcare. That
is where our attention should be focused.
What is needed in Canada is a universally
accessible affordable childcare system
with capital and operating funds available
to non-profit providers, and the mainten-
ance of a subsidy program forlow-income
parents.

That would be one important step in
implementing the spirit of the Convention
on the Rights of the Child.

a “stop-gap” in the process of revising the
assessment system, and said the next step
would be city experts working out a fairer
system with public involvement.

The finance committee rejected the mo-
tion, with aldermen Puil, Philip Owen, Gor-
don Price, Don Bellamy and Mayor Gordon
Campbell voting against. Aldermen Davies,
Rankin and Bruce Eriksen supported it.

The committee subsequently voted un-
animously for six motions from Campbell
that included dropping the property-based
school tax, capping taxes again this year, and
informing residents through advertisements
that they have the right to appeal their as-
sessments.

Ata meeting organized by the committee
earlier last week, several speakers charged
that assessments were created on an un-
scientific basis.

“We need to break through the secrecy of
this arbitrary process,” Yorke told the meet-
ing Oct. 22 at Heritage Hall.

Manuel Azevedo, a lawyer who recently
worked in Ontario on assessment appeals,
said the theory behind the Assessment Actis
that appraisers will use comparisons of sales
of similar properties in a neighbourhood to
determine an individual’s assessment. But
with 1.3 million properties in B.C. and cut-
backs in Assessment Authority staff, there is
“no way they can carry out all those ap-
praisals,” he said.

Instead, the authority uses a mass ap-
praisal technique, subtracting the assessed
value of the building from the total to arrive
at a value for a resident’s land, Azevedo
related.

Civic New Democrats aldermanic can-
didates Mel Lehan and Ian Reid urged resi-
dents to appeal their assessments, saying a
log-jam of the system was the best way to
fight it. Lehan said the “bottom line is that
we’ ve (the city) got to cap those taxes.”

Yorke told the press conference after the

_ finance committee meeting Oct. 25 that,

contrary to NPA statements, it was not a
useless effort to have a city-launched appeal.

“Tf the (vote) had gone the other way, it
would have made banner headlines,” he
said.

Yorke said that the citizens group had
limited resources but that it would do what
it could to assist residents to appeal, includ-
ing providing free professional help. The
deadline for appeals is Oct. 31.

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2+ Pacific Tribune, October 29, 1990