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Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

You might be missing something, because business tax rates have been going down each year since 2012.

See here:

Business assessment values are market-based and fluctuate with the economy. If someone owns a small house on 17th Ave, which is being used as a cafe, for example, the value of that business is combined with the value of the property, which in turn produces a combined assessed value respective of that. One may disagree with the concept of market-based property valuations for taxation purposes, but that is a totally different and hypothetical discussion, which has nothing to do with this thread or Council leaning.

The previous and current Councils have been very pro-business, which statement is supported by pretty much every business association in Calgary.

Thanks for this.

I had read a while back on the Chamber of Commerce site something somewhat different in regards to how much small business was enjoying the policy changes that resulted in higher taxes for owners.

This part stuck out.

You, our members have told us that your biggest challenge, the one that keeps you up at night, is the increased cost of running a business. That getting hit by policy changes from all levels of government has made it extremely hard to run a successful business and provide jobs.

To support our members, we have engaged with governments at all levels, raising red flags on budgets and policies, calling for lower taxes and fiscal discipline, so that governments get out of your way, and don’t make it any harder to run a great business. We have called for good, prudent, business-friendly policy.

While that call has not always been heeded, we have secured some big wins for your business this past year. One I would like to highlight: we worked with the City to bring $45 million in business property tax relief to help support businesses in our city. For thousands of your businesses, this tangibly reduced your property tax.

To show the scope of the impact of combined government costs have on your business, we have launched what we call a Cumulative Cost Assessment – a report that will be used to demonstrate how policies from each level of government are imposing new costs on Calgary business in an already challenging time.

So it looks like it was a policy change that hurt them then was somewhat corrected, but the "feeling" was that it was still expensive to do business in Calgary.

I have no idea myself as i am not a business owner and haven't been for many years. Just talking to people who are gave me a very different perspective. Then again that is only on side of the story too.