NDP Leader Howard Hampton will deliver a fair deal for people who are fed up with the unfair and arbitrary way Dalton McGuinty assesses their homes for taxes.
“It’s not right that unfair property assessments are causing seniors, people on fixed incomes and young families to lose their homes. Dalton McGuinty has abandoned hard-working homeowners. He denied them long-term relief, instead preferring to delay real action to fix property assessments until after the provincial election,” Hampton said.
Hampton today announced that Ontario’s NDP will fix the province’s broken property assessment system with a new Freeze Till Sale property assessment model.
“Our Freeze Till Sale plan will freeze the assessed value of your home at its purchase price for as long as you own your home. It would replace the McGuinty Liberals' unfair, arbitrary and punishing property assessment system and make property assessment fair, predictable and easier to understand for today’s working families,” Hampton said.
Calling McGuinty’s temporary assessment freeze a “ticking tax bomb waiting to explode,” Hampton said Freeze Till Sale is the only way to make sure families will have long-term protection against punishing raises to property assessment values.
“The problem with Dalton McGuinty’s property assessment policies is that they are focused on elections – not fairness for today’s working families. We must not lose sight of the fact that Mr. McGuinty has done nothing to fix the underlying problems that are driving up assessment in the first place. So when Mr. McGuinty’s temporary freeze comes off, property taxpayers are going to get hit with two years of pent-up property assessment increases. That won’t be pretty,” Hampton said.
“Only the Freeze Till Sale model will provide the kind of long-term property tax predictability people deserve,” he said.
Here is how the Freeze Till Sale property assessment model will work:
• Property assessments will be frozen at their value as of January 1, 2005, the date of the last province-wide property assessment.
• Properties will remain frozen until the property is sold or until renovations totaling more than $40,000 have occurred.
• When a home changes hands, the sale price becomes the new assessed value. As such, a prospective buyer can know with a fair degree of certainty what they will pay in property taxes for years to come. This forms part of the home buying decision, and is a true test of the ability-to-pay principle.
• "Freeze till Sale" is revenue neutral and will mean no loss of revenues for municipalities
The Freeze Till Sale property assessment model was first put forward by the NDP Task Force on Assessment and Property Tax in October 2006. The task force, led by NDP MPP Michael Prue, consulted experts, stakeholders and people at forums in communities across Ontario. It recommended the Freeze Till Sale model as a positive alternative to an existing assessment system it found to be “overly complex, volatile, unaccountable, and unfair.”
Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin chronicled the problems with Ontario’s property assessment system in a scathing March 2006 report called “Getting it Right.” Marin found the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation treats homeowners with disdain. A survey of properties found problems in nearly half and errors that affected value in more than one-third. Taxpayers who challenge an assessment are forced to take part in what Marin calls “a David vs. Goliath mismatch” where ordinary people with few resources at their disposal take on a Crown corporation.
"In one corner you have the average citizen, with scant information on his property and very little additional useful information to make his case, facing an adversary in the other corner with a full bank of relevant data, collected at taxpayers expense,'' Marin said when unveiling his report. "This is not a match-up, it's a slaughter, and it's happening in tens of thousands of cases every year.''
Hampton’s Freeze Till Sale plan is the second property tax fairness initiative the NDP has put forward. The NDP has also put forward its fair deal for municipalities and families. It would rebalance the provincial-municipal fiscal relationship by freezing transit fares for two years, easing pressure on rising property taxes and providing increased support for key municipal services. The plan has earned rave reviews, including:
• The Toronto Star called Hampton’s plan “a fair and realistic plan to ease the downloading that is crippling municipal efforts to thrive” that “every property taxpayer in the province should welcome.”
• The Peterborough Examiner said “The New Democratic Party has promised to take back court security costs that were previously downloaded to the municipalities. There isn't a municipality in Ontario that would disagree with this. The province is the proper place for this …”
• The Ottawa Citizen’s Randall Denley says “full marks to Hampton for addressing a real problem in a fair way.”
“Dalton McGuinty got property taxes wrong. New Democrats will get it right,” Hampton said.