Taxation and housing key topics at FCM meetings in PG this week: Councillor Frizzell

Municipal leaders from across Canada are in Prince George this week for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) Board of Directors meetings.

“Imagine the Mayors or Councillors from all across Canada getting together all at once to advocate to the federal government,” said Prince George City Councillor Garth Frizzell.

“That’s what FCM represents, it’s elected officials from coast to coast to coast, French, English, rural, urban, men, women, from all over, and we’re speaking with one voice to the federal government.”

Frizzell said one of the topics this week will be how taxation works in Canada.

“We’ve got a structure we inherited from 17th, 18th Century in Britain, and when it came to Canada, municipalities got ten per cent of the taxation because we were managing about ten per cent of the infrastructure,”

“Now municipalities are responsible for about 60 per cent of the cost of infrastructure, all across Canada, and we still get about ten per cent of the taxes overall.”

Frizzell said the biggest advocacy push is to rationalize that.

“The provincial and the federal government have entirely different ways of raising revenues to provide the services we need, and it hasn’t been updated in all of this time.”

He added housing is a key push as well.

“We’ve had successes over the years, we got about $10 million to help with the pool here in Prince George, that was through a fund that the FCM helped advocate for with the federal government,”

“We got a district energy system with funding and loans through the Green Municipal Fund of the FCM, even our police station here in Prince George from the Green Municipal Fund as well.”

Frizzell added FCM was responsible for getting Safe Restart money from the federal governments, which was matched by the Province.

“We might not accomplish that as easy on our own, but having the voice of 2,000 municipalities it really makes the federal government sit up and pay attention.”