Last week, the City of Saint-Hyacinthe adopted a budget including a “special tax” to finance its Green Fund for Sustainable Development. But opinions are divided on the benefits of such an approach, however innovative it may be.
“The majority of citizens want us to do more for the environment. I think we’ve gotten there, ”says Mayor André Beauregard, for whom this is his first term as head of the City.
The new tax consists of a levy of $0.0069 for every $100 of property value. The equivalent of $20 for a $290,000 property. It will affect all sectors – residential, commercial, institutional and agricultural – because “everyone must do their part”, according to the mayor.
The City plans to raise $544,000 in its coffers in order to finance a plethora of measures: purchase of charging stations for electric vehicles, outdoor water fountains, planting of trees, control of water chestnuts (a species that contaminates bodies of water), sustainable mobility plan, etc. And this is only the beginning, insists Mr. Beauregard. “What would be desirable is for it to increase every year. »
For now, the tax has not made too many waves locally. But one of the elected members of the municipal council, David Bousquet, believes that this is not a “real” green tax. “In reality, the special tax is a very ordinary property tax. […] If we want a real green tax, it has to bring about changes in behavior,” he argues.
“It creates pressure on land that does not bring in anything. Thus, instead of taxing everyone, the City should, according to him, tax behavior that harms the environment or apply what is called the “polluter pays” principle. “Let’s take the example of a wooded lot in the heart of the city,” he continues. Why should the owner be taxed in the same way as an owner who chooses to develop and pave his entire property? »
Send a clear signal
Mr. Bousquet also fears that the environmental cause will be harmed indirectly. “We use the qualifier “green” to allow the social acceptability of a tax rate that would probably not have received the same reception. »
During the adoption of the budget, the councilor recommended that we rely instead on taxes targeting parking lots, the volume of waste or even urban sprawl. Inspiring suggestions for next year, retorted the mayor. “These are things we will be looking at for the next few years,” he added in an interview.
By creating the special tax, the City also wanted to send a clear “signal”, pleads the director of communications and citizen participation of the municipality, Brigitte Massé. The council, she said, “wanted to take concrete action”, not “drown” that in the budget. “We wanted to clearly establish that for our city, sustainable development is a priority and that it doesn’t happen by itself, that it takes money to get there. »
Of course, more money has to be found for the environment. But the question of “who should pay” is very important.
Mme Massé also insists on the fact that the City has created a “dedicated financial reserve for the green fund, which means that the special tax goes directly into this fund and cannot be devoted to anything else. ‘other “. The City, she points out, is acting on other fronts: water tax on the consumption of industries and businesses, water tax on certain swimming pools and above all, tax on wastewater treatment modulated according to discharges. pollutants.
According to an expert in the field, the debate on the green tax raises crucial questions. “Of course, more money has to be found for the environment. But the question of “who should pay” is extremely important,” believes Corinne Gendron, professor in the Department of Strategy, Social and Environmental Responsibility at the University of Quebec in Montreal. In terms of eco-taxation, she says, it is absolutely necessary that the measure has an “incentive or dissuasive character”, otherwise “we miss the boat”.
A precedent in Quebec
The measure adopted last Monday by Saint-Hyacinthe proves, according to research carried out by The duty, unpublished in Quebec. The national capital and the city of Gatineau provided, in their recent budget, for the creation of a green fund to ensure the ecological transition and mitigate the effects of climate change. However, neither of the two municipalities imposed a specific tax to finance these reserves.
Ecotaxation is indeed still timidly used in the province, according to an inventory published last year by the Chair in Taxation and Public Finance at the University of Sherbrooke. Among the OECD countries, Québec ranked fourth among the states using such measures the least.
Elsewhere in the world, cities that have adopted taxation similar to Saint-Hyacinthe seem rare. Those with the greenest ambitions tend less to charge for bad ecological behavior than to encourage or even reward good ones.
For example, Lahti, in Finland, is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2025. Six years ago, this industrial city, heavily polluted 50 years ago, became the first in the world to establish, as part of a pilot project , an application capable of tracking the carbon footprint of its population in real time. CitiCAP is able to calculate the emissions of each user and determine the average weekly pollution that each household should generate, depending on their size and geographical location.
Each user whose carbon footprint is below this threshold is rewarded with virtual euros, redeemable in local shops and public services. Good behavior, in this way, allows you to buy a bus pass, a concert ticket, groceries, etc.
At the end of the trial period, Lahti found that 36% of the 2,500 participants had reduced their footprint. Here again, the initiative was not funded by a green tax, but rather by a European fund aimed at supporting municipal innovation.
Regulate instead of tax
Other cities prefer to use their regulatory power to curb sources of pollution. This is the case of Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany, which has simply abolished the use of plastic bottles and disposable coffee capsules in public buildings.
The current green capital of Europe, Grenoble, is considering taxing SUVs next year to discourage their purchase. Its ecologist mayor, Éric Piolle, believes that polluting vehicles represent “a plague for the planet” and restricts their use in the city center.
In return for these bans, Grenoble offers several alternatives to the car: the tramway runs, cyclists have access to an extensive network, buses leave at regular intervals from the city center to the foot of the surrounding ski centres. The city also plans to make public transit free for everyone on weekends, and at all times for the less fortunate.
One thing is certain, there is currently a lot of “experimentation” at the municipal level in terms of environmental policies, observes Professor Corinne Gendron.
For example, several cities wanted to impose a tax on the volume of waste. “However, we ended up with measures that can be very inequitable from a social point of view, because the volume of waste does not take into account the number of people living in the same dwelling, in particular low-income families. “Ecofiscality measures are very tricky. We have to make sure that we are not reinforcing inequalities, because we want to do good for the environment. »
One avenue to look at, according to her, would be to “remunerate” cities that conserve natural territories instead of developing. A crucial gesture in his eyes, since currently, the land tenure system indirectly penalizes the cities that do so. However, for that, she acknowledges, the higher levels of government would have to intervene.