Land Value Tax! What an exciting subject…! No.. no, it’s not.

But it is vitally important. Tax policy influences everything and it seeps into how we design, build, and live in our cities.

There is a certain amount of pessimism that comes with living in Winnipeg and Manitoba. People insist that long standing problems can’t/won’t be fixed due to the problems existing in the first place. How to fix them? Start now. What do we do, though? Keep the status quo. We’re failing to achieve our potential as a community when we say that we’re willing to pay the high cost of inefficient policies and infrastructure decisions.

We see it again and again when we know that, for example, having railroads downtown cost the city more than it earns. Building bridges ain’t cheap! 22 underpasses in Winnipeg due to the fact that we have rail yards inside Winnipeg ain’t cheap!

Continuously building the same bridges and underpasses over and over again is a dead end, yet here we are in 2020, some 50 years after Edmonton removed most of their rail lines that ran around the city, and members of the general public take extreme positions on the removal of the rail yards.

In the same vein, we also are continuously not taxing and densifying Winnipeg in all the ways that we could. Changing a tax policy can be revenue neutral as well, so it’s not about raising more revenue - it’s about allowing for the incremental development of Winnipeg to succeed despite the fact that 90%+ of land that could be improved is privately held.

LVT is well over a hundred years old. It’s time.

LVT should be on the tip of tongues at every level of government.

It’s not and that needs to change.

The LVT article has been updated today with some more details. If you like it, please drop us a line or share it with your friends. Consider that we have the ability to change it for the better, but only if we make it known that it’s better and that means talking with your friends, neighbours, and government.