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14 October 2007

If you voted for McSlippery...

You don't get to bitch and moan about what MPAC is doing with your property taxes...
Stella Bruce, 79, a mother of six, moved from Calgary two years ago to the Ontario town of Bancroft with her husband, Carmon, a retired mechanic. The reasons were twofold: Carmon was born in Bancroft, and the couple's son, Glen, had a piece of property at the bend of a street on the outskirts of town on which they could build a home.

And so they did. They ordered a pre-fab home that arrived in two pieces on flatbed trucks, and plunked it down on the property. That single-level home, plus the foundation, cost $125,000, and it remains unfinished.

Yet it, along with the garage their son built next to it, has been assessed by MPAC at a value of $226,000 -- which has them paying annual property taxes of $3,575.

"We are on a fixed income that doesn't amount to much," Stella Bruce says. "We're old. We worry about sudden health costs.
In the wake of the scathing report on how MPAC screws over Ontario property owners, both John Tory and Howard Hampton, promised that they would take concrete steps to redress the inequity and arrogance of the people who administer Ontario's property tax system.

Dalton McGuinty took a pass... he merely said the Liberals would read the report... and that's not good news for Stella Bruce.
"Yet no one can explain to us -- not our lawyer, and not MPAC -- how we can be assessed a value more than we paid for our house," she says. "Not only that, it is certainly more than we could ever sell the house for -- if we are pushed into that kind of corner.
So the next time you get the assessment on your home with it's attendant 30 percent increase, remember... if you voted Liberal... you did this to yourself.

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RELATED: Brace yourself... here it comes

Remember how McSlippery dealt with the scandalous MPAC report? He capped assessments... until after the provincial election.
"Dalton McGuinty is putting a cap on a boiling pot, but when it does boil over in 2008, you're talking about three sets of assessment increases which could be somewhere between a 30 to 50 per cent average increase if we see the same pattern continue," said Hudak.
Congratulations Ontario... on hitting yourself in the face with a hammer.

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