Calgary has some of the lowest municipal taxes in the country and, generally speaking, the citizens are absolutely loathe to change that. And this includes any nuber of extra fees that are tacked on in other places, such as the garbage collection fee (that’s roughly $50 a year and has been in place for quite some time). The increase from 2010 to 2011 on that fee was a whopping 15 cents a month, which I don’t consider to be a big deal, but others do. Now if you really want to hear some Calgarians freak out, have a peek at the fancy new residential recycling programme, which is $8.75 a month ($105 per year). If the city has supplied you with a handy-dandy recycling bin, alongside your handy-dandy city-supplied garbage bin, you get charged this new fee as well. A number of people are losing their shit over having to pay for this service, although overall the programme has been tremendously succesful, increasing recycling in town by 70% in the first year.
Basically, I’d attribute these fees to the City just conducting business in a fairly normal fashion (for us, at least). Provincial money tends to go to infrastructure and that sort of thing, with very little going towards city operations interests. And again, overall, Calgarians do not get hit hard at all with taxes and fees (although are parking rates downtown are among the highest in North America), so I don’t consider it dickish on the City’s part to charge for services rendered. YMMV.
Well, I think because MM does V is why I’m asking Montreal doesn’t charge for garbage or recycling (though it’s obviously part of the residential taxes land owners pay), nor for municipal water for residential buildings, etc. Parking charges are going up, but were rather reasonable until the past couple years, IMHO. The province does send money back to municipalities in various ways, though I admit that I’m not really up on the numbers or mechanisms of that. It sounds like you do get to keep more of your gross salary, but I guess I’m wondering how much more?
I’m not sure we can discuss the parking fees in downtown Calgary without noting that the City of Calgary has made trying to keep people from driving downtown a priority for many years.
I’ll also note that city of Calgary taxpayers are fickle, silly creatures. We bitch and moan and complain every year about the deplorable street clearing in winter, and then bitch and moan and complain when the City tries to implement street clearing policies that will cost each of us a couple of dollars a month.
Regarding healthcare in the province of Alberta (and especially Calgary, since we were hit the hardest with Klein’s Kuts); we have a news story every six months or so about how the government is throwing millions of dollars at healthcare here, and the progress results are minimal at best. It is taking a long, long time to recover from such brutal cuts - to use an analogy, Klein did not cut fat from Alberta healthcare; he cut legs and arms and vital organs out.
Heh - and we complain when it takes the city more than 4 days to remove all the snow from every single road and literally carry it away! I’m used to my street getting cleaned on the two evenings following a storm (one side of the road per day)…if that doesn’t happen and there’s still snow on the road 48 hours after a storm, I start to grumble.
A quick google search suggests that Calgary’s snow plowing budget is about $33 million a year. Montrealspends an average of $17 million per 20+cm snowfall, and anticipates $145 million a year in snow removal activities.
So a ton of our money goes to that, let alone other services!
To be fair to King Ralph, this was about the time that the Chretien Liberals (Paul Martin I guess) drastically reduced transfer payments to the provinces, no? Mike Harris in Ontario had to slash and burn stuff here too.
So, I blame the Liberals.
Spending my teens in Kitchener, ON, I recall that it was city policy to have every single street cleared within 24 hours of a snowfall. Moving back to Calgary in the late 80s and seeing that only the major roads get plowed, and only some of the minor arteries get salted, was a bit of an eye-opener. Granted, in the grand scheme of things, Calgary does not get a lot of snow, situated as it is right on the edge of the mountain rain shadow. However, planning for chinooks to do the bulk of the snow removal work for town doesn’t seem like good policy to me and never has. Side streets in this city are frequently treacherous or virtually impassable by mid-February, which makes for way more collisions and way more stress. I’d happily kick in another ten bucks a year to my municipal taxes to improve that situation (which is what City Council has suggested would be the cost), but the majority around here seem to think the staus quo is just fine.
As much as it pains me to defend the Liberal Party, Chretien, or Martin…
I would agree with you if Alberta were in a situation at that time where it needed a bunch of federal money to stay afloat. As I noted earlier, Alberta was already in the black in the early 90s, although there were a few billion in bank debt making things look a little less rosy. Klein took it upon his government to eliminate that debt as quickly as possible, with little or no consideration of the long term ramifications of his actions. Close to two decades later, we are still feeling the effects from the brain drain that happened as a direct result of chasing medical professionals, teachers, and post secondary students away. Thank God for $100/barrel oil or this province would be fucked.
There are neighbourhoods here where, if you don’t have a four wheel drive truck, you can’t get out of your neighbourhood for days (even weeks) at a time. I wish I was exaggerating.
I’m good with that.
In all fairness to King Ralph, I don’t think he ever anticipated that Calgary (and all of Alberta) would see the kind of growth we had, just after he had made all these brutal cuts. Three hospitals in a city of 650,000 is bad; three hospitals in a city of over a million is, well, our healthcare plans at this point are, “Don’t get sick.” In all fairness to the healthcare workers here, they have stood on their heads to try to make things work. That creates a whole new set of problems, though, in that they burn out more quickly.
One of my acquaintances on Facebook posted the following quote on his Wall:
It generated quite a heated debate but in fact it was just one person on one side and all the others praising the person who posted the quote and the quote itself (in the form of the usual “tell it like it is” spirit).
Now, without going into is it really true that you cannot celebrate Christmas in Public School system in Canada, I find it somewhat annoying and inflammatory in the way say, Fox News like to talk about “War on Christmas” in US.
What got me more riled up is the more unbelievable claim of “they want to stop playing the national anthem at morning assembly” which in my mind is clearly designed for inflammatory purposes and to rile right-wingers and bigots north of the border. I find it inflammatory because it takes one fairly abused phrase similar to “war on Christmas” in public schools and elevates the inflammatory language by suggesting that “some religious families” are objecting to national anthem being played in school’s morning assembly. Like, if you thought that (Christmas issue) was bad, how about this (stop playing national anthem). When asked to say who those who want to stop national anthem playing, he couldn’t provide a cite or reference.
So, I wonder, what do fellow Canadians think would be a most appropriate response to nonsense like this (provided, of course, that you agree it’s nonsense).
“This is nonsense, not remotely supported by any facts, and is nothing more than pathetic fearmongering by people with a complete lack of critical thinking skills.”
On that note, I’m off to paddle an outrigger canoe and then try and steal my coach’s job and steer a dragonboat for a while. Steering >>> drumming!
I heard that the local schools here are hiring armed guards during December to shoot any children who mention the Baby Jesus or Santa, bring presents to school, or wear red or green. Shoot them dead. This policy has wide support among our godless liberal population.
Okay, actually a couple years back I was doing some work in a public school gymnasium in December and the kids were rehearsing a nativity pageant. Not a secular Santa and reindeers pageants, but a Joseph and Mary one.
It was a shock to me when I moved from Toronto. There, I was used to everything typically being bundled into my property taxes: garbage, recycling, sewage, water, and so on. Here, it’s all broken out (sometimes in a separate utility bill that arrives monthly), and you can see what you’re paying for recycling, for example. The idea that you can have a “catchall” type of property tax that pays for a number of services all at once seems to be lost on Albertans; and in the end, after tax, utility, and other service bills are added up, Albertans are likely paying approximately what anyone does elsewhere anyway.
Good thing it doesn’t cost anything to send out millions of bills or to process millions of bill payments, or that would be a huge systemic inefficiency compared to folding things into property taxes.
No, hold on a second. Public schools in Ottawa don’t celebrate Christmas. At least they don’t hold school-wide concerts anymore. I don’t know if it’s just some schools or a total ban by the school board.
My kids are in the Catholic system and of course Christmas is celebrated there, but I’m pretty sure the Public system has abolished sanctioned Christmas celebrations.
You make a good point, but I’d suggest that it would be lost on Albertans. Simply put, Albertans hate, loathe, and despise taxes. However, they seem to have no problems with user fees, and similar. So, even though it might be part of a tax in another province; in Alberta, if you dress it up as a user fee, or utility bill, Albertans will happily pay it. Oh, there may be some griping, especially when rates have to rise, but not nearly as much as if it was called a tax.
Curiously, Albertans seem to be happy spending money to avoid paying roughly the same amount in taxes. Case in point: the recycling programs that Jimbo referred to earlier. Without curbside recycling, Albertans stored all their recyclables, and eventually took them to a recycling and/or bottle depot–incurring fuel costs in the process; and in some cases, time costs as well. Especially given today’s fuel prices, I can easily see where one trip to the recycling depot would cost about the same in fuel as what Jimbo said the cost would be per month.
The attitude is changing, albeit slowly. People from other provinces arrive in Alberta, and wonder why Alberta is the way it is, given that things work so much better, are more efficient, etc. back in _____. There are no real answers, other than “we hate taxes,” and “we’ve always done things this way”; which don’t really fly in the face of, “you mean you store up old cardboard and newspapers for a month and drive them to a depot, when they can be picked up weekly at the curb with minimal effort on your part?” arguments. At least one of our local councillors, being a native Albertan who has been fortunate enough to have seen the way things work elsewhere, is pushing hard for curbside recycling here. His efforts and arguments seem to be making some headway, but as I said, it is slow.
Nope. Not when she doesn’t give up her dead --we’d rather be live pirates.
November is for cleaning house. December-April=ski; April-May=white water; May-September=dragon boat, outrigger, sea kayak and canoe; September-October=hike and bike. Nothing worth going outside for in November. That month is just plain nasty.
OC-1. Today I took the yellow one. It yaws to the left. I go out and paddle for an hour, lately while listening to Strung Out on my iPod. I don’t go really fast, but I don’t allow a lot of breaks either, so I manage about 5.5km each time, never stopping for more time than I need to get a sip of water.
It’s down a canal and back, though, so not much variety. I circle around one bridge’s supports and come back. I’d love to paddle regularly on a lake, but for now I just use the equipment available at my dragon boat club’s site. Here’s a picture of a nearly empty boat (rescheduled practice time that worked for no one!) and a rainbow. That was the first time I steered. I think I may have posted this here before! It’s a really pretty a peaceful place to be. It’s also rather narrow, so a great place to learn to turn!
That’s kind of what I’m wondering - if you add up all the municipal, provincial and federal taxes and fees, what percentage of income is that, and how does it compare to elsewhere?
Montreal doesn’t charge for garbage or recycling (though it’s obviously part of the residential taxes land owners pay), nor for municipal water for residential buildings, etc. Parking charges are going up, but were rather reasonable until the past couple years, IMHO. The province does send money back to municipalities in various ways, though I admit that I’m not really up on the numbers or mechanisms of that. It sounds like you do get to keep more of your gross salary, but I guess I’m wondering how much more?
