Overhaul overdue

It’s time for Queen’s Park to quit dragging its heels on the issue of land tax reform and finally erase the gross inequity that has residents of Fort Frances and other district municipalities shouldering too much of the burden of provincial downloading.
Surely even the bureaucrats pushing their pencils in far-off Toronto can grasp that residences going for $200,000-$300,000 in the unorganized areas east of the Causeway should be paying more than $40-$60 a year in property taxes.
Land tax reform has gone nowhere since being proposed back in 1998 by the former Conservative government under then premier Mike Harris. But the problem has been festering for much longer than that, given there’s been no reassessment of the roughly 60,000 provincial land tax accounts since 1940—and the uniform tax rate of 1.5 percent hasn’t changed in 50 years.
True, properties in unorganized areas shouldn’t have to pay for municipal services they don’t receive. But basically getting off scot-free to help cover such things as the Northwestern Health Unit, Rainycrest, and social housing, to name a few, is equally ludicrous.
Revising the land tax formula is a question of equity, plain and simple, and should be implemented immediately, not merely reviewed and then shelved for a future government to tackle some day.