Editorial: BC Conservatives table bill to undo NDP's pipeline tax gift
By Sara Golling
BC’s NDP government has proposed that pipelines shouldn’t have to pay municipal property taxes at the same rate as other landowners. The other taxpayers in municipalities with pipelines would see increases in their tax bill, to make up the difference in the amount of money required to continue providing services and amenities.
According to the mayor of Clearwater, as quoted in a CBC article, the difference to residential taxpayers would be “pretty dramatic.”
As many municipalities are already having to raise taxes significantly to cover the burden of beginning to address the “infrastructure deficit” caused by many decades of inadequate spending on repairing and replacing aging infrastructure, in addition to maintaining level s of service, the value of a tax gift to pipelines at the expense of other taxpayers is debatable.
And now it can be debated in the BC Legislature, because the BC Conservative Party has tabled legislation to undo the gift to the pipelines. I hope the debate will be well-reported — we all deserve to know all the pros and cons of such a major shift as that proposed by the BC government.
That shift — a tax gift to the pipelines — would constitute yet another taxpayer-funded subsidy to the fossil fuel industry. Those subsidies have been estimated at between three billion and thirty billion dollars per year, depending on the year. For more information on that check this article, from 2020, or another article here from July 2025, or if you prefer the business perspective, this article from the Business in Vancouver magazine in April 2025.
Taxpayers may well wonder why we are all paying so much to help out companies that are not only already highly profitable, but are also contributing so heavily to destructive climate change, which is also costing us all a lot of money –not to mention peace of mind.
That’s one thing to wonder about. Another thing is — what are we all going to do about it?
