LYING about conducting an appraisal of ANY KIND regarding my property.
But just where the hell does their property value figure come from? It certainly isn’t a price at which
the government would buy the property from me. The government wouldn’t purchase it from me at
that price or any price. They wouldn’t need to buy it from me if they wanted it. As the
administrators of the land ownership registry in the province, if they wanted my land they could
seize it from me at no cost to them at all.
I received a demonstration of the ease at which the Crown confiscates property from independent
owners when in 2002 the Vancouver office of PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc., in conjunction with the
BC government, unilaterally seized from my family the land on which that scrap metal junkyard on
McLean Road is located.
Like I say, I have absolutely no idea what the government’s value of my property is based on. It
seems to me that an honest way of calculating property value would be by looking at the price any
bidders are willing to pay for it and/or the price of a recent sale of the property or a property exactly
like it. However, there is no backlog of bidders waiting to buy my property. Nobody wants to buy
it. In fact, several years ago I consented to a demand from the two co-owners that I absorb their
share of the property ownership at no cost to me because they didn’t want it anymore. That’s right
-- at no cost at all! It wasn’t worth a fucking penny to them. Unfortunately for me, even though I
said yes to the proposal, their lawyer refused to execute the transfer, but that’s another story
altogether.
As far as looking at the last sale of the property as a way of determining its value, that took place in
the early 1970s when my father purchased it and to my knowledge that price was less than a tenth of
what the government claims it’s worth today.
And as far as basing its value on the sale of an identical property, there is no other property to
compare it to. It’s not a cookie-cutter property by any means.
What this means is that the value given by the Crown in their Property Assessment Notice is not
determined through any technical calculation, therefore it can’t be considered anywhere near
accurate. And if I have no idea what my property’s worth, is it realistic to believe the government
knows what it’s worth? No it isn’t.
But even as an estimate, the value they give is false and grossly inflated. For instance, one of the
factors that should go into the value of a property is whether or not that property can be easily
liquidated by way of a sale to a buyer. I don’t believe that my property could be easily sold here in
Powell River. On the contrary, even if I could put it on the market through a local real estate agent, I
don’t think it would be an easy sale. The real estate I own is a large property that would not appeal
to the average home buyer. It’s a unique property that would require a unique buyer who would be
hard to find.
An example of this is a property just down the highway from my house that’s had a “for sale” sign
planted in front of it forever, at least since I moved back to PR in ’05. It’s a cool-looking, modern
home that you’d think would be very easy to sell, but no, nobody’s buying it.
The truth is, it’s absolutely impossible for the government to definitively estimate what my property
is worth. The only way the value of a property can be truthfully determined is by putting that
property on the market and allowing the market to decide what, if anything, its value is via a sale.
And if you put it on the market and it doesn’t sell then it doesn’t have much value, does it?
And what if you literally cannot put it on the market? Can the real estate companies in this town be
trusted to properly administer a house sale? Not from what I’ve seen. Can the lawyers be trusted?
Not on your life. And the banks here are a fucking joke. Three financial institutions in this town
have been involved in the theft of cash from me, a hell of a lot of money in some cases. These
banks have basically screamed at me not to deposit money in Powell River. It’s been demonstrated
to me that if I do, the money is not in any way protected and can be taken by anyone who asks for
it. When it’s not agents of the provincial government, like lawyers and accountants, stealing my
money, it’s been the federal government taking money from my bank accounts. There’s a very
serious white-collar crime scene in Powell River.
As such, even if I could find a decent real estate agent in town and was able to sell the property,
there’s nowhere for me to deposit the proceeds of a sale. And BC Assessment should know full
well about the fraud situation here. All of the crime I’ve been hit with has been reported to the
government, from the local cops right up to the premier and the prime minister.
And there are other factors that can reduce or cancel out the value of a property. A few years ago I
was enlightened to the federal government’s nasty proclivity for slapping liens on land owned by
those it claims owes them tax. The problem escalated to the point where Canada Revenue Agency
was attaching a new lien to my property every twelve months. Liens will eat away at the equity you
hold in your home and take away its value. And man, is that ever EXCITEMENT OVERLOAD
from the provincial and federal governments just because I happen to own something. Fucking calm
down already!!!
As well, if you co-own your property with one or more people that too could make a sale a difficult,
if not impossible, proposition. And keep in mind that navigating the sale of a home requires social
and mental skills. People lacking those abilities (like seniors suffering from dementia for instance)
might be unable to sell their own property, making the government’s assessment value entirely
meaningless.
It seems to me that until a property is sold, the only price that can be put on it is the price at which it
was purchased by the current owner. Whatever the owner paid for it is what it’s worth.
What do I consider the value of my own property to be? Since it functions as my residence, to me
it’s worth the equivalent of what I would otherwise pay if I was renting elsewhere. If I was renting
I’d probably be paying around $700 a month. Therefore, the property is worth that much to me:
$700 per month or $8,400 on an annual basis.
Assessment Notice and a bill they call a Rural Property Tax Notice. I’m going to explain how these
documents clearly show that the Crown detests property owners and is using an illegal hate tax to
wage a war against us.
Both documents are exceedingly troubling, but it’s the Rural Property Tax Notice that is particularly
repulsive. The outrageous amount of money the Crown demands from me in the Rural Property
Tax Notice and the mystifying justification they use to demand it is just so obtusely irrational it can
only be described as outright crime. Their paperwork betrays their behavior as nothing more than
the sleaziest exploits of the most rotten shysters around. Every twelve months I feel like I’m being
extorted by the mob.
Before I proceed, I should point out that, as I’m only familiar with the property tax documentation
for my own property, it is that documentation alone that I’ll be discussing in this article. However,
there could be property tax schemes in other jurisdictions similar to the scam I’m dealing with, if not
precisely the same, so my evaluations might be of interest to others who feel they’re being unjustly
held under the gun by the government regarding their property.
One thing I have learned is that the Crown is discriminating against me by making me pay a
preposterously higher tax rate than other people with property of similar value to mine. I recently
found out that I pay almost TWENTY TIMES (!) more in property tax than my neighbor, yet my
property is assessed at only about three times the value of his property. For whatever reason, I’m
being singled out by the Crown with a ludicrously inflated property tax levy.
Like I say, the Rural Property Tax Notice I receive is utterly disgusting. But before I get to the
Rural Property Tax Notice, allow me to start with the Property Assessment Notice that precedes it.
The Property Assessment Notice
Every January I receive in the mail a letter from a BC government agency named BC Assessment.
This document, called a Property Assessment Notice, contains a figure in cash dollars which the
government claims is an estimate of what my private property is worth. The government also claims
that the figure is used to calculate the amount of property tax they bill me in the Rural Property Tax
Notice.
Both these claims are totally false. For one thing, the property tax amount they charge jumps around
every year -- only upwards for the past few years now -- regardless of what they say my property is
worth. What’s more, the things they charge me for on the property tax bill have absolutely no
bearing whatsoever on the property I own or what they say its value is.
And as far as the value estimate itself is concerned, the figure they provide is MASSIVELY inflated.
In fact, considering that the property doesn’t have a “resale” value, they shouldn’t even ATTEMPT
to peg a price on it at all. But let’s take a closer look at just how illogical this document is.
