Len Taylor has a better future as a straight man than he does as a comic.
The opening joke in his address to the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities convention elicited a few chuckles, but later in his speech Saskatchewan’s minister of government relations nearly brought the house down with his earnest remarks about property tax relief.
Taylor told the 2,400 registered delegates attending the association’s 100th annual convention that the NDP government has lived up to its commitment to provide much-needed relief to the province’s farmers.
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“We delivered on that promise,” said Taylor, whose comment was greeted by a chorus of laughter and heckling.
After a brief pause he repeated himself.
“We delivered on that promise and we promise to do more,” said the minister, to another round of abuse.
Taylor was referring to the $110 million the province has earmarked over the next two years to reduce the education portion of property taxes.
It is expected to provide an eight percent reduction in tax bills for all of the province’s ratepayers.
SARM president Neal Hardy said that money doesn’t address the fundamental inequity in how property taxes are collected in the province, with farmers shouldering too much of the burden.
Douglas Watson, reeve of the RM of Scott, drove that point home when he told Taylor and other provincial cabinet ministers participating in a bear-pit session that farmland owners in his municipality paid $1 million in a district where there are 42 students.
“That’s $24,000 per student. Maybe they’re a little slow and stubborn these kids, I don’t know,” said Watson, garnering a few guffaws of his own.
Hardy said the frustrating thing is that premier Lorne Calvert publicly recognized the disparity at the 2004 SARM convention when he told delegates, “without doubt there is an inequity in the level of education tax on farmland.”
Yet his government went ahead and implemented a tax relief program where rural and urban ratepayers received an identical break, said Hardy. “The unfairness and the inequity has not been dealt with.”
SARM delegates have been making education tax resolutions dating back four decades, but the province has been “very hard to push” on the issue, said Hardy. He added that a one-time $37 million payment is needed to put rural taxpayers on equal footing with their urban counterparts.
Calvert told convention delegates the eight percent reduction leaves them far ahead of where they were two years ago.
“There is no doubt we have much work to do, but without doubt we have made a significant beginning,” he said.
Taylor acknowledged the $110 million provides only temporary relief.
“What we haven’t done yet is address the inequity between agriculture properties and others, which Mr. Calvert has indicated in the past he would look at.”
That will be part of a long-term solution that hinges on the province negotiating a better equalization payment deal with the federal government, said the minister.
The $110 million to be doled out in 2005 and 2006 represents 30 percent of the $367 million in equalization payment money the province recently received from the federal government for past grievances. Taylor is confident Saskatchewan can work out a new deal with Ottawa that allows the province to keep a larger portion of future resource revenues.
“A change in the equalization formula takes us a long way to addressing the inequities in education property tax relief,” said the minister.
“We should have an idea what the federal government is going to be able to do for us by the end of this year.”
