Two Presentations on Municipal Finance: Non-Residential Property Taxation in Canada and Reform in Québec

This event features two presentations on current issues in municipal finance in Canada. The first presentation draws on an original dataset covering 171 municipalities across Canada to examine the relationship between non-residential property tax rates, the non-residential property tax base, and local economic development. It also considers the rationale for higher tax rates on non-residential properties and the extent to which these rates may be justified.

The second presentation examines the rationale and main recommendations of the recent Jérôme-Forget and Marceau report on municipal finance in Québec. It will provide an overview of the context in which the report was commissioned and discuss several of its key recommendations, with particular attention to proposed changes to infrastructure grants that would link funding to municipal tax effort.

Speaker:

François Vaillancourt is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Université de Montréal and a Fellow of CIRANO. He holds a PhD in Economics from Queen’s University and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009. He has also served as a consultant to the governments of Québec and Canada, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.