Principles and Guidelines

The Commission is asked to undertake their work using the following principles and guidelines.

4.1    Equity – Members of the Commission should have an appreciation of the impacts of any changes to the tax distribution on all classes of taxpayers.

4.2    Sustainability – The recommendations made to Council by the Commission should be consistent with the City’s long-term objectives concerning economic, fiscal and social sustainability.

4.3    Independence and objectivity – Members of the Commission should serve independently, and to the best of their abilities make recommendations to Council that will result in the best possible outcome for Vancouver as a whole, without favouring any one stakeholder group over another.

4.4    Simplicity – Any recommended changes to the City’s property tax policies should be simple, transparent, and readily understandable by the City’s taxpayers and other stakeholders.

4.5    Consultation – The Commission should appropriately engage the business community, residential taxpayers and other key stakeholders in the process undertaken to arrive at their recommendations.

4.6    Transparency – The work done by the Commission should be transparent, with the Commission’s public process minuted, and recommendations reported to Council and available to the public.

4.7    Maintain Fixed-Share Approach – The recommendations of the Commission should be developed within Council’s current tax policy framework of a “fixed share” approach to determining the property tax distribution, in which the share of the total tax levy allocated among property classes is determined by Council rather than by changes to market values.

4.8    Municipal Taxes Only – The work of the Commission should be limited to a review of the distribution of property taxes levied by the City of Vancouver (termed “general taxes”), and should not include property taxes collected by the City of Vancouver on behalf of other taxing authorities.

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