Holy sweetness. So there are complaints that rural Alberta might be paying more than it's fair share?!?! That's a load of brown bananas.
Property taxes on farmland aren't based on the assessed value of the property, they're based on a formula the minister of agriculture develops every year. The formula means farmland pays taxes at approximately 10% of it's assessed value. For the municipal portion, I don't care. If the County of Wheatland wants to move it's tax base from farmers to what little housing/industry it has, more power to them. But it's patently unfair when it comes to the provincial/education portion of the property tax. Farmland isn't paying anything close to it's fair share, which means it's being subsidized by housing in cities, industry, commercial, etc. Everyone else is paying more tax so they can pay less.
And then they complain about the linear taxes. Those are taxes on pipelines/powerlines. Rural areas have more of those, and they use them to fund their services. Of course, having a pipeline in your county doesn't require much for services... Basically, they're taxing pipelines at high rates and farmland at low rates, and then complaining that county residents are getting screwed.
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