William MacBeth from Save Calgary joins me to talk about the catastrophic property tax hike levied on Calgarians in the middle of the worst economic downturn in 100 years. The Gunn Show is a free audio-only version of my show, The Gun Show, hosted by Ezra Levant and featuring special guest William Macbeth of Save Calgary.
00:00:00.100Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
00:00:05.980Tonight my guest is William Macbeth from Save Calgary and we are discussing the catastrophic property tax hike levied on Calgarians
00:00:14.880in the middle of the worst economic downturn in about a hundred years.
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00:01:04.620Justin Trudeau isn't the only liberal politician raising taxes during the pandemic.
00:01:23.800I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
00:01:26.320Calgary is experiencing between 13 and 25% unemployment, depending on how you measure it.
00:01:49.040Cowtown's being hammered by low oil prices, lack of pipelines and the carbon tax, as well as the coronavirus lockdown.
00:01:56.700However, just like Trudeau, Mayor Naheed Nenshi is raising taxes.
00:02:01.220In some instances, people are complaining of a 20% hike on their property taxes.
00:02:06.640The city is seeing a drop in, quote, revenue and fees caused in part by city-run places being closed to ward off the spread of the coronavirus.
00:02:14.460Once again, though, the city has come knocking, looking for more money from the embattled and, in some instances, unemployed and broke taxpayers to pay for services and infrastructure they have not been allowed to use for about the last 90 days.
00:02:30.680The city, though, they're not going to be cutting spending and putting some big projects on ice.
00:02:35.340Oh, no, they're coming right back to the trough.
00:02:38.160It's crazy and inhumane and it's causing rightful outrage.
00:02:42.880You see, the cupboards in Calgary are bare.
00:02:45.020So joining me tonight to talk about the lack of restraint at Calgary City Council while the citizens of Calgary are doing their best to watch their nickels and dimes is William Macbeth from Save Calgary.
00:03:05.340Joining me now from his home in Calgary is my friend William Macbeth from Save Calgary.
00:03:16.680And it's been a long time since you've been on the show because of this horrible coronavirus lockdown.
00:03:25.240A lot of things have happened in Calgary, even though it seems like there's not a lot happening in the world.
00:03:31.500Let's go back a little bit to the $235 million budget shortfall in the city of Calgary.
00:03:44.940So that's, you know, a quarter of a billion dollars.
00:03:48.340And so naturally, the solution to this is not to cut spending, rain in spending, rain in pensions down at City Hall, but rather to raise taxes on homeowners during probably the worst economic crisis in 100 years.
00:04:10.480What's interesting, of course, is that the economic crisis didn't start in Calgary in March of this year.
00:04:17.580We have been in an economic crisis for several years now.
00:04:22.260The vacancy in our downtown office towers, higher unemployment, all of these things have been in place since at least 2015.
00:04:30.880But the city really hasn't changed its spending behavior since then.
00:04:35.400And even in the last budgeting cycle, which happened in November and then December of last year, so pretty recently, no concerted effort was made to actually reduce spending between this year and last year.
00:04:49.440They claim that they have cut spending, but how the city cuts spending is different than how you or I cut spending.
00:04:55.000We look at cutting spending, if we spent $100 on groceries last month, and now we're spending $75 on this month, we would consider that a cut.
00:05:03.560But for the city, if they spent $200 last month and they plan to spend $300 this month, and now they're only going to spend $250, they call that a cut, even though it's still a earning increase.
00:05:15.560So that's kind of the situation Calgary found itself in, is when COVID hit, some of their tax revenues dried up, there were fewer people taking transit, there was less money coming in from different fees, surcharges, and levies.
00:05:29.000And as a result, the city found itself in a budget crunch.
00:06:04.740How does Menchi expect the taxpayer to bear this sort of tax hike?
00:06:10.720Well, we're actually not 100% sure what's in the mayor's head right now.
00:06:15.760The mayor sent home a piece of propaganda with everybody's tax bill this year.
00:06:20.760He sent a letter, and in that letter, he makes a lot of claims.
00:06:25.220He claims that spending has remained flat, even though it hasn't.
00:06:29.820He's claimed that most people saw very modest increases in their taxes, which we know isn't true based on all of the people who have come forward talking about their outrageous tax bills.
00:06:41.660He's claimed that the city has made cut $740 million in savings, even though spending is at its highest level ever in the history of the city of Calgary.
00:06:51.920So it's possible the mayor just doesn't realize we're having a problem because he's so out of touch with what's been happening to Calgary homeowners.
00:07:01.540But certainly the idea that people are facing these small tax increases is absolute baloney.
00:07:08.460People are getting hammered by higher taxes, and they're getting hammered in two ways.
00:07:13.760They're getting hammered because taxes are just going up, and they're getting hammered because they're shifting more of the tax burden onto homeowners and away from businesses.
00:07:22.420We lobbied that if they were going to do this, all they should do is cut business taxes.
00:07:28.060They should reduce the tax burden on businesses, but city council decided instead to put that burden on the backs of homeowners.
00:07:35.740And you're absolutely right, many of whom are really struggling during this tough economic time as businesses have been closed down and people have been laid off.
00:07:42.780Yeah, I see a real crisis that's going to happen for homeowners and specifically those who have secondary residences that they're renting out because now they're not working and their renters aren't working and property taxes have increased on both locations.
00:08:02.800And yet there's very little reprieve for these people, and I worry about the number of foreclosures that are heading towards Calgary.
00:08:12.360I saw some numbers today in black locks.
00:08:15.500CMHC says there won't even be close to a recovery until 2023, and yet Nenshi's raising taxes right now.
00:08:25.660I can think of two governments that have raised taxes during this pandemic.
00:08:30.740One is Justin Trudeau on April 1st, raising the carbon tax 50%, which also hits Calgarians, but then Nenshi also raising municipal property taxes.
00:09:05.980Population plus inflation came up to roughly 19%, and Calgary's municipal taxes have gone up 24%.
00:09:11.920So they're charging significantly higher tax rates, tax increases than property plus inflation.
00:09:17.600So, no, if you think about it, if your income is stagnant or severely decreased from what it normally is because of this, you don't have any more money to go off and pay for higher taxes.
00:09:30.380There's just no money left for you to do that.
00:09:33.160So you're either going to have to cut expenses somewhere else, you're going to have to maybe cut your health care expenses, cut your food, cut whatever you can, or you're going to just have to sell some of your possessions or even give up your house if you can't afford to pay those property tax hikes.
00:09:50.500And when we say massive, in some cases, people are seeing 20, 30, or 40% increases in their tax bills, and that translates to hundreds of extra dollars per month in property tax hikes.
00:10:03.460So these are not these small tax increases that the mayor keeps trying to sell Calgarians through his propaganda.
00:10:09.040Now, speaking of propaganda, I suppose one of the pesky conservatives at Calgary City Council, Jeremy Farkas, he did a rebuttal letter to the letter that Mayor Nenshi sent out to Calgary homeowners explaining why he needed to gouge more money out of them, despite the fact that services are not going up in Calgary.
00:10:33.720Farkas went through and, I guess, point by point, kind of debunked everything the mayor was saying to sell the property tax hikes.
00:10:46.540By the way, that mail-out from the mayor seems pretty political, and yet it seems he's using city resources to do that.
00:10:58.220You know, this is the mayor who's never shied away from spending the taxpayers' money on whatever he thinks is important.
00:11:06.440I think, you know, when State Calgary went through the mayor's letter, we found at least five or six just identifiably false statements included within it.
00:11:19.360So, you know, you think to yourself, it's bad enough that the mayor is using our tax dollars to pay for this propaganda, but he's actually using our tax dollars to send out a misleading, you know, some might even say false letter to every homeowner along with their property tax bill.
00:11:37.640And it would be one thing if maybe city council recognized there was a problem, but the city council doesn't recognize that they are still firing the spending on all cylinders.
00:11:50.480They are spending money at an unprecedented rate right now, and they're about to ramp that up even further if all of the proposed projects they're considering are given the green light to go ahead.
00:12:01.200It's frightening. Now, I'm glad you mentioned these proposed projects because the green line.
00:12:12.160Let's talk about the green line. Maybe give a little history of the green line so people really understand what a boondoggle this is.
00:12:19.720And then we can talk about, you know, when the mayor says there's no efficiencies to be found and we just can't cut spending.
00:12:27.920You have this behemoth of the green line that has just been a money pit since it started.
00:12:34.740Why isn't the city looking at doing something about rolling back the green line just to save money during this pandemic?
00:12:43.140Well, it's a very valid point, and it's one of the issues that we've been deeply concerned about.
00:12:50.100The green line has been around for about 10 years as an idea. It's been through a dozen iterations.
00:12:56.780It's seen almost every one of its senior managers walk off the job at one point or another.
00:13:01.760It has been redesigned fully, at least on three separate occasions.
00:13:06.940But it's undead. It's the LRT line that keeps going.
00:13:14.120We have a proposal to build about half the original green line.
00:13:18.660It's going to run from just north of the river to somewhere in the mid-south.
00:13:23.880And the original green line proposal called for transit and LRT service to go to the far, far, far north of Calgary and the far, far, far south,
00:13:31.840basically where people live in suburbs and in emerging communities.
00:13:37.900They're going to spend more than $5 billion to build less than half the original size of the green line.
00:13:44.700And even though people have raised so many red flags about this project, about the cost,
00:13:50.760about the technical complexity of the project and how it seems needlessly complex at points,
00:13:56.600there are simply those on city council and, you know, the special interests who say,
00:14:02.560damn, whatever the torpedoes are, we're going to build this come hell or high water.
00:14:07.360But this isn't like some other projects.
00:14:09.940This project is so big and so expensive, it risks Calgary's financial viability.
00:14:15.840If this project goes off the rails, it could literally bankrupt our city.
00:14:21.100And yet they seem to just be wanting to push this through regardless of everyone's concerns.
00:14:27.820And let's, you know, there's a few things that we find interesting.
00:14:30.900First of all, they haven't laid a single kilometer of track, single meter of track in this green line.
00:14:37.060Yet they've already spent more than $500 million on it.
00:14:40.760So why do I think this green line is probably going to go ahead?
00:14:44.200Because they've already spent half a billion dollars on it.
00:14:47.320So if they stop now, that's just, you know, in their mind, they've wasted half a billion dollars.
00:14:53.220Second of all, it is still one continuous line with an underground,
00:14:58.780extensive underground tunnel section through downtown Calgary.
00:15:02.480There's no reason why this has to be one continuous line.
00:15:05.860Who are these people who need to go from the far north to the deep south of Calgary?
00:15:11.660There's, I'm sure there's some, but there's very few.
00:15:15.320What people need are ways of getting from the suburbs into and out of downtown.
00:15:19.580That's where most people use our transit system for.
00:15:22.660So the idea that it has to be one continuous line is just this vanity exercise on the part of city councillors.
00:15:30.860So we have so many issues about this and it's coming up for a vote, a final vote of council in about a week.
00:15:37.900And we're worried that council is going to put us on the hook for a project in the middle of an economic crisis that we simply can't afford to build.
00:15:45.760When we think about the sheer expense of this project, it is in line with the proposed Olympics, billions-wise.
00:16:00.780And yet, there doesn't seem to be the same level of public input into this, at least for me from the outside looking in.
00:16:10.260The public were very engaged in the Olympic bid.
00:16:13.660They were, to, I suppose, Nenshi's credit, I can't believe I'm saying this,
00:16:18.800but the public were allowed to give feedback and participate in a plebiscite about that.
00:16:26.900And yet, council's probably going to go ahead with the same level of spending on this green line.
00:16:35.860And the public, who are on the hook for it all, they're really not getting a voice in any of this.
00:18:18.500So we're rushing through the most complex and expensive project in Calgary's history, and it could well end up following in the same line as those other LRT projects, a complete disaster.
00:18:30.620I'm glad you guys are watching all this spending.
00:18:34.060It doesn't seem like there are a lot of municipal watchdog groups, particularly here in the north, where the work you do is so needed.
00:18:43.600Now, I wanted to talk to you about another campaign that Save Calgary is running because, you know, you guys are Calgary-focused, but there are provincial issues that you talk about.
00:18:57.460And you have, I suppose it's an awareness campaign about an Alberta pension plan.
00:19:05.820Why do you guys think that's such a great idea?
00:19:07.880Look, I don't need convincing, but maybe some of the viewers do.
00:19:10.480So I think if you ask a typical Albertan, if you say, do you think Alberta gets a fair deal from the federal government, the response would be overwhelmingly no.
00:19:23.180And I think that's not a crazy position to hold by any stretch of the imagination.
00:19:29.580A lot of work's been done showing exactly how much money Albertans are transferring to other provinces through federal transfer and equalization programs.
00:19:39.600But a huge one that doesn't get the kind of attention that maybe it does is the Canadian pension plan.
00:19:46.100Albertans subsidize the Canadian pension plan for the entire rest of the country because we have a few unique characteristics.
00:19:53.920First of all, we are one of, if not the youngest provinces.
00:19:57.000The average age of an Albertan is far younger than an average age of a Nova Scotian or even someone who lives in B.C.
00:20:05.960Albertans are, there are more Albertans participating in the workforce.
00:20:10.460A larger percentage of Albertans, if they can find work, go to work and pay taxes and pay payroll taxes, including pension contributions.
00:20:18.820And a larger portion of Albertans are in higher salaries.
00:20:21.740We're maxing out our contributions to the Canadian pension plan.
00:20:25.240And as a result, there are regions in Canada who don't have these characteristics.
00:20:30.840They're a net drain on the Canadian pension plan.
00:20:33.760And it's Albertans who are footing the bill to keep that going to the tune of $3 billion a year.
00:20:39.080We believe an Alberta pension plan would, first of all, keep Alberta money in Alberta.
00:20:43.900It would keep Albertans' own taxes for the benefit of Albertans.
00:20:47.740It would not have to subsidize the rest of the country whose productivity and contributions are lower.
00:20:55.640And thirdly, we've seen Ottawa, particularly under the Liberal government, become increasingly politically interfering in the affairs of things like the, well, certainly the RCMP has seen political interference.
00:21:09.240But how long is it before Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government decide the Canada pension plan won't invest in any oil or gas for carbon tax reasons?
00:21:17.080Well, we can keep our own pension plan and have it invest in things that make sense for Alberta and Albertans, including if it's a good investment in Alberta oil and gas.
00:21:48.160We think Albertans should see the options that are available.
00:21:50.820And we think that this is a good one for people to consider.
00:21:54.180Now, do you think this is going to be in Jason Kenney's Fair Deal panel?
00:21:59.460And also, are we ever going to see the Fair Deal panel?
00:22:03.920Because we were supposed to see it and then, oh, a virus came along and now we're supposed to see it again.
00:22:10.500What are your predictions for the Fair Deal panel?
00:22:12.680So I understand that it is supposed to release its report to us, the voters, the everyday people of Alberta, next week after it's been held close by the government for a few weeks now.
00:22:26.800My guess, and it's only a guess, is that they will be pretty status quo friendly, that they won't particularly be brave and bold when it comes to recommending new measures for Alberta.
00:22:42.860And I think it's one of the reasons why we've seen Alberta take a few small steps, things like appointing its own chief firearms officer and its own parole board, because they're going to try and show they're doing something.
00:22:56.340Because when the report comes out, they're actually not going to do very much.
00:22:58.900So we wanted to make sure Albertans knew what was being considered by the Fair Deal panel before that report came out, just in case the government decides to try and wash it all under the table.
00:23:10.720So, you know, if they do that, we're going to try and hold them to account because we think these are important ideas that are good for Alberta.
00:23:17.720But I have to be honest, I'm not really holding my breath about this Fair Deal panel and its report.
00:23:26.460Governments are nothing if not predictable, and they are generally not bold.
00:23:31.980William, how do people support the very important work that you do?
00:23:36.640Because not only do you run education campaigns, but you also are key in stopping these massive spending projects, particularly in Calgary.
00:23:48.020I would say that you and another group with your little shoestring budgets, you stopped the Olympics and saved Calgary taxpayers billions of dollars.
00:23:57.140Could you imagine if they were trying to hold the Olympics right now, like trying to get ready for the Olympics?
00:24:02.780I mean, just the foresight that Save Calgary had to stop that, good gracious, Calgary owes you guys a debt of thanks.
00:24:11.420But how do they support the work that you do?
00:24:14.260Because even just a little bit of money, you guys use that to make a huge impact.
00:24:19.020Well, and thank you very much, Sheila.
00:24:20.740I, you know, I think all to all, the biggest enemy of good government at the local level is just people not knowing what's going on down at City Hall.
00:24:29.660So we think it's important that there's at least one group whose job is to tell people what city councillors are doing, especially given how often they try and raise your taxes.
00:24:40.240So if you, you know, think that's an important role, if you think that it isn't just big companies or big unions who should have lobbyists, everyday taxpayers should have lobbyists too, and that's what we consider ourselves.
00:24:53.940You can follow us on all our social media channels.
00:24:56.560They're all Save Calgary if you search for them.
00:24:58.960You can make a contribution to us online through our website, and we appreciate every single dollar that hardworking people contribute to us.
00:25:06.540And sign up to our mailing list so you can, you know, keep on top of what's happening down at City Hall.
00:25:12.520A lot of people don't know when they're raising your taxes because the city's budgeting is so opaque.
00:25:20.100I tried to look up how much Calgary was proposing to spend this year, and after a few days of research, I still couldn't.
00:25:38.560We're going to keep trying to make sure people know what's happening down at City Hall with their tax dollars.
00:25:43.640And if you go to SaveCalgary.com, sign up to our mailing list, or make us a contribution, that really helps the work that we're trying to do.