Okay, so I want my taxes frozen for 25 years.
And let’s negotiate a significantly reduced rate before we bring that into effect, shall we?
How do you think your local government – or the provincial or federal governments for that matter – would feel about a proposal of that ilk?
Yeah, us too. We get it. Liquid Natural Gas development was a big election promise for Christy Clark and the Liberals.
She’s taken a beating for not being able to move LNG negotiations along at more than a snail’s pace until now.
But we don’t think this is what anyone envisioned when they thought about the potential of this industry and heard the virtues extolled as if we were all going to be rolling in royalties that would set up B.C. for decades to come.
Instead we’re being presented with decades of corporations sitting pretty while ordinary taxpayers stare down the bore of rising rates for everything under the sun. Where are our two-and-a-half decade tax freezes?
They’re not immune under the deal from provincial sales or regular corporate tax raises, but freezes in so many other areas promise huge losses for the public to benefit corporations that don’t need our help.
The province says it will provide the company in question with the certainty it needs to go forward.
Who gets certainty these days? The ordinary Joe doesn’t get promises that his job is going to be around for the next 25 years, why is a corporation a special case?
We could just about stomach some of this if it went with promises of long-term, well-paying jobs for people in this province, and a plan to put some of the revenue into development of renewable and truly clean energy sources.
Though even then we firmly believe that corporations such as these which are more than capable of doing so while maintaining huge profits, should pay their fair share.
But there are no such promises on the table. Oh sure, they say the project will create up to 4,500 jobs (which in the grand scheme of things isn’t really that many over a decade), but there are no promises that those jobs will be for British Columbians.
There’s just a desperate government negotiating on our behalf as if we need this and the corporations don’t. is is a sellout of epic proportions that will straightjacket our governments for a quarter century. We could not be less impressed with Christy Clark and her negotiating posse.
We wouldn’t want them bartering the terms if we were buying a house. In fact, we wouldn’t want them if we were buying a used sofa at a yard sale.
