This text is part of the special section Municipalities
On the program of the Assises de l’Union des municipalités du Québec (UMQ), two events aim to give a boost to municipalities seeking revenue to promote their ecological transition. Interview with the vice-president of the UMQ and with experts who will take part in the discussions.
The mayor of Varennes, Martin Damphousse, has been taking part in the Assises de l’UMQ for 16 years. Visiting the trade show booths, attending panels and talking with his counterparts, he discovered during this annual congress “full, full” of innovations more respectful of the planet which he then implemented. place for its citizens. He cites as an example a 100% electric fire truck and LED lights for street lighting.
“There is an extraordinary effervescence there. I love that ! says the man who has held the reins of the city of Montérégie for 14 years. As vice-president of the UMQ for a second consecutive year, he suggests that two topics will be on everyone’s lips during the event: the housing crisis, felt in all regions of Quebec, and taxation.
“Everyone is talking about reviewing the financial model of the municipal world. We are 70% dependent on property tax income. If we want to increase our income, we have to increase our buildings, and therefore build more”. Nonsense in the context of the climate crisis, believes the Varennois.
Cities, including those of the Metropolitan Community of Montreal (CMM), he says, aspire to protect wooded areas, wetlands, biodiversity, agricultural land, and to turn golf courses into parks. They want to participate in the ecological movement, while renovating their infrastructures and imagining strategies to become more resilient to climate change. But all this, in the current fiscal context making administrations dependent on new construction, would cost “a lot, a lot, a lot of money, without bringing in a penny”.
Conference — diversifying municipal revenues, mission impossible?
On May 4, a seminar led by journalist and columnist Jean-Philippe Cipriani will focus on the measures that cities can put in place to vary their sources of income. The mayor of Laval, Stéphane Boyer, will take part in the discussion, as will professor at the National School of Public Administration (ENAP) Fanny Tremblay-Racicot.
According to the researcher, only “a handful” of elected officials in the province use all the funding levers at their disposal. Thanks to a law passed in 2016, all cities in Quebec have a general power of taxation: they can impose a direct tax, as Montreal does on parking.
This power makes it possible to levy revenues that replenish the overall fund of the municipality. “You can do whatever you want with it. [les sommes]. Of course it’s more acceptable from a political and social accessibility point of view if you say, like the mayor of Montreal Denis Coderre when the tax on parking spaces was adopted, that it’s is to fund the growing need for public transit. The fact remains that it is paid into its general fund. It gives more latitude,” explains Fanny Tremblay-Racicot.
Under this same law, the first order of government is also authorized to charge regulatory fees. In this regard, the City of Prévost, located in the Laurentians, is a pioneer: since 2022, it has demanded a fee of a few cents from consumers who buy certain single-use items, such as disposable plates or bottles of water. The income goes into a special fund aimed at financing the ecological transition.
Unlike the general taxation power imposed on everyone, regulatory charges are restricted to a group of citizens, often to correct or encourage behavior, and must be deposited in a special fund.
Elected officials cannot set regulatory fees in all situations. At the request of the UMQ, Fanny Tremblay-Racicot conducted research during which she identified these exclusions provided for in the law. She also scrutinized the tax tools used by municipalities in Canada and abroad, and those listed by the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OECD), in order to draw up an inventory of the options available to cities to finance the ecological transition. , or simply to increase their income.
“We identify the types of taxes that could be adopted under legislative and legal parameters”, popularizes the researcher. An analysis that she will be able to communicate to the elected representatives present at the Assises.
Alain Webster, president of the Quebec government’s Advisory Committee on Climate Change, agrees that administrations are not always aware of all the means at their disposal to increase their budget. “There is expertise to be developed, information to be shared,” he notes.
Grand forum — financing the transition: the challenge of the decade
Alain Webster will take part in the grand Forum des Assises, hosted by humorist and actor Emmanuel Bilodeau. During this one-and-a-half-hour meeting, he will deliver, alongside several other panelists (including six mayors), his thoughts and possible solutions for financing the green shift.
“Whatever the tool we develop, we must both seek a source of income, but at the same time that this income is associated with a change in behavior,” he says. Policy makers need to think of ways to dip into the wallets of polluting citizens — who drive around in big vehicles, waste water, throw a lot of trash into landfills — and the coffers of resource-harvesting companies. natural. Municipalities can do this by using their power to impose fees.
The professor of ecological economics at the University of Sherbrooke believes that Quebec should provide more support to local governments. “The structure in terms of financing cities which seeks to balance its budget only by increasing its tax base contributes directly to these issues of spreading [urbain]. »
Above all, Alain Webster hopes to demonstrate the “importance for municipalities of being players in the fight against climate change by simultaneously doing two essential things”. The first is to rapidly reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to limit global warming, and the second is to implement adaptation strategies.
“Municipalities have an obligation to limit the rise in temperature to 1.5°C. We will not be able to adapt with a global increase of more than 4°C. It won’t work anymore. There is a limit to our ability to adapt. The more the temperature rises, the more difficult it becomes, if not impossible, to adapt to this new context,” he argues.
Financing the transition is truly the challenge of the decade for municipalities, observes Alain Webster. They have an “essential” role to play in the preservation of islands of greenery that absorb GHGs, in the construction of an energy-efficient housing stock and in the development of active and collective modes of transport. “In the transport aspect, a set of specific elements associated with the movement of people are directly linked to the ways of developing our cities. In Quebec, the transportation sector generates 43.3% of GHG emissions, according to the latest 2019 data provided by Quebec.
This special content was produced by the Special Publications team of the Duty, relating to marketing. The drafting of Duty did not take part.