Chuck Jacques thrust his finger twice at the podium 15 metres away.
“Farmers aren’t opposed to paying property taxes for education. Right
now, Mr. Minister, farmers in my (rural municipality) are paying more
than $20,000 per student per year for each child in our school and your
department plans to close us. Then we’d pay more than $20,000 per child
and have no school,” said the reeve from the RM of Norton.
Jacques was highlighting the plight of the Pangman, Sask., school,
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which is threatened with closure.
But his comments addressed the larger issue of why many farmers say
Saskatchewan’s education tax is unfair.
Jacques’ comments to education minister Jim Melenchuk came during the
Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities mid-term convention
held in Saskatoon on Nov. 14-15.
The issue of the education portion of Saskatchewan’s municipal property
taxes and the rate farmers pay compared to urban dwellers sparked a
movement two years ago within RMs to withhold tax payments from the
province. While few failed to make their payments, the protest was
widely supported in the farm community.
“If grain prices were better it might not be as important to them right
now,” Neal Hardy, a reeve from Hudson Bay, Sask., and SARM president,
told the 900 delegates to the convention.
“But the fact is that it is an unfair way of paying for education.”
A SARM-commissioned report on the subject was presented at the
convention.
It showed that while farm size increased 32 percent in the past 20
years, education taxes doubled. Each farmer not only paid more for each
acre of land he owned, but many also paid on more acres.
Ken Perlych, a Lethbridge-based consultant, wrote the report.
Hardy feels the government has been too slow to change the method of
taxation for education.
“The government is not anxious to say to the other taxpayers in
Saskatchewan that they need to pay more. So we wait,” he said.
Melenchuk said the reliance on property tax for education is unfair and
after the new provincial property assessment is completed in 2005, the
province will act to “have a long-term fix for this problem.
“We are looking at a new property assessment system that takes into
account income and revenue streams and the effect they will have on tax
revenue and fairness,” said the minister.
One of the “fixes” was a commitment from the minister to solve the
problem that 18 of the 95 school divisions receive no money from the
province for operations. The divisions are entirely rural and pay more
to the province than they receive.
SARM passed two education tax resolutions during its two day meeting.
Both called for a reinstatement of the tax rebate system that expired
this year.
They also called on the government to increase that rebate from 25
percent to 40 percent, to exempt home quarter sections and to deduct
the rebate at the ratepayer level.
