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Toronto Star: NDP wants property taxes frozen

Canadian Press

October 23, 2006

The Liberal government will take steps to ensure Ontario's property tax assessment system is fair but won't adopt an NDP proposal to freeze assessments until a home is sold, Finance Minister Greg Sorbara said today.

The New Democrats said people are fed up with the way their homes are assessed and called for a new method of assessments called the "freeze-until-sale" model.

NDP finance critic Michael Prue said the plan would eliminate the uncertainty faced by homeowners because the assessed value would remain the same from purchase date until a home is sold, unless major renovations were done.

"These recommendations would make the system stable, understandable, fair and sensitive to those struggling on low incomes," Prue told a news conference.

"Ontario property taxpayers are angry about the volatility of the system. They're angry about the near impossibility to predict one's assessment or to understand how it is arrived at."

But Sorbara said it's not practical to have two identical homes, side by side, assessed at wildly different values just because one has a long-term owner and the other was recently purchased.

"One property owner is paying two or three times as much tax as the other property owner and that does not make for good neighbours," Sorbara said.

"When you freeze assessments until a house is sold, you create huge inequities in a neighbourhood (and) you distort the real estate market and discourage the sale of property."

Prue said people are afraid to open letters from the Municipal Property Tax Assessment Corp., knowing they'll likely face higher taxes.

"Every year when you get the MPAC letter, I know people, with fear and trepidation, open that letter to see how much MPAC says their house is now worth."

The Liberal government announced last summer that it would freeze the estimated value of Ontario homes for two years while it revamps the property assessment system — a move critics described as ``ducking" the hot-button issue until after next year's provincial election.

Sorbara said today that the government would take action before the review of assessments is due to be completed in June 2008, but he wouldn't say if any changes would be made before the election next October.

"We're looking at changes even before that review comes out to make the system fairer, more transparent and more equitable," Sorbara said.

"I'm not making announcements today."

Conservative Leader John Tory noted one of his members had proposed a five per cent cap on property assessments, and said the Liberals should either act on one of the opposition parties' proposals or do something of their own.

"The government is keen only on freezing assessments and freezing themselves into doing nothing about the property tax issue, which I hear about whenever I go door to door," said Tory.

"I think that their promise to not act on this is going to really hurt them, and more importantly, hurt a lot of seniors and other people across the province."

Last March, Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin blasted the Ontario assessment process as unfair, and called the property assessor an elitist operation with questionable practices that result in thousands of incorrect evaluations each year.

Homeowners in Ontario have long complained that assessments are wildly inconsistent and fail to reflect the actual sale prices of properties.

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