Vancouver mayoral hopeful Shauna Sylvester has a proposal she says could provide relief for the city's struggling small businesses.
Vancouver mayoral hopeful Shauna Sylvester has a proposal she says could provide relief for the city’s small businesses struggling with ever-rising property taxes.
But while many in the business community have long called for tax reform, some have questions about the details of Sylvester’s idea.
At various campaign events, including Sunday’s candidates’ town hall in Chinatown, Sylvester has raised her proposal to look at creating a new subcategory for small, local businesses so they could pay a lower property-tax rate.
Most businesses in Vancouver pay what’s known as triple-net leases, meaning tenants are responsible not only for paying the landlord the rent, but also maintenance fees and property taxes. Typically, when the assessed value goes up dramatically for a big multi-tenant commercial building, the property owner isn’t the one on the hook for the bill — it’s the tenants.
Sylvester, who previously sat on the B.C. Assessment Board and the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, said she’s been discussing the idea with various people recently, including, just in the last week, the former chair of B.C. Assessment, and a provincial cabinet minister.
But property-tax agent Paul Sullivan said while the idea is “not without merit,” there are some challenges.
“Our community retailers and local independent business are paying too much,” said Sullivan, a senior partner with Burgess, Cawley, Sullivan & Associates. “So from that perspective, it’s good. The difficulty with it, like so many other propositions around a different class, is how are we going to define it? How are we going to define what a local independent business is? Is it square feet? Number of stores, number of employees, volume of sales?
Sylvester said details would need to be worked out around defining what constitutes a locally owned small business, but she pointed to the precedent in the federal income tax system, where small businesses receive different tax treatment.
Amy Robinson, executive director of LOCO B.C., an organization representing the independent business community, said tax reform is needed, because recent studies have shown Vancouver businesses pay a higher portion of the property tax burden than other Canadian cities, as compared with residents.