Homeowners who might otherwise love to see the value of their Lower Mainland properties soar may sour at the thought of tax notices arriving right about now.

Assessed values are climbing, skyrocketing in some cases. And, even though the nominal tax rates might dip downward as councils recognize that they can’t raise taxes as fast as house prices rise, the bottom line on most tax notices is still getting more onerous every year.

But keep smiling. It could be worse — and I’d argue that perhaps it should be. We homeowners have friends in both high and low places, and, thanks to a long-standing provision of the B.C. property tax system, they’ll team up to help us handle these nasty tax bills once again.

Our friend in high places is a provincial government that seems — for political reasons that are easy to understand — content to maintain and even bolster a 47-year-old subsidy that homeowners have come to love and rely on.

Your friends in low places are all the many renters who, along with businesses and a relative handful of rich property owners, must help you pay your tax bill whether they want to or not.

Now you might think that renters, who are by no means always poor but who nonetheless often can’t afford to buy a home in today’s super-heated Lower Mainland market, would be a whole lot less fond of a policy that has them paying someone else’s taxes. And you might think they’d squawk pretty loud.

Judging from their usual silence on the matter, however, I can only assume that most of them don’t notice. Because there are surprisingly few voices raised against this policy which says, in effect, that people who can’t afford to own a home must chip in to help pay the taxes of most of us who can.

The annual provincial grants soften the property tax bite to the tune of up to $470 (and up to $275 more for seniors, disabled people and veterans) for all British Columbia homeowners, except for the 4.5 per cent whose property is assessed at more than $632,000.

These handouts have been around since 1957, untouched by administrations of sharply different political stripes, no doubt because they’re both popular with the people who get them, and helpful to those who are stretched too tight by big mortgages.

But the policy isn’t fair.

Simply put, Victoria must tax all of us — the rich and the poor — to give the grants to those of us who already have enough money to own our homes.

It’s true, as the grants’ defenders like to point out, that homeowners’ tax money also goes into the pool that pays the money out. But not a cent of it goes back to people who don’t own property. That makes it discriminatory.

Meanwhile, those of us who are lucky enough to already own property in the red-hot Lower Mainland market are seeing the value of our assets soar, thus widening the gap between those who have and those who’d like to.

Homeowners, who will see the grants spelled out on their property tax bills when they arrive in the mail any day now, are a much more cohesive lobby group than renters, who aren’t ever told they’re being stuck with an unfair tax burden. So it would no doubt be political suicide for the Campbell Liberals to suddenly pull the plug on these grants.

Indeed, the government upped the threshold of assessed value at which they start to be clawed back. Where once it was $525,000, now it’s $585,000, meaning that the grant is not completely phased out until a property is worth $632,000 for most taxpayers, or $659,000 for a senior or disabled citizen.

If the government’s interest was tax fairness, not political points with a powerful group of voters, it would be tweaking the grants in the other direction. It would at least start to phase out a policy that simply isn’t defensible under any measure of sound tax policy. People who don’t own their own homes shouldn’t have to pick up the tax tab for people who do. It’s as simple as that.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004