Ryan Property Tax (Ryan Canada ULC) wants to unfreeze the assessments so it can appeal those same assessments. The company makes money from reductions in assessed values when municipalities refund taxes after a successful challenge of the MPAC assessed value. While it’s true that the reassessment can redistribute assessment values and ultimately taxes, the opposite is also true: municipalities have a stable tax base right now. Because there is no reassessment, there are fewer assessment appeals that lead to reductions in taxes. A home owner’s taxes may go up or down with a reassessment. If your assessed value goes up by more than the average, then your taxes will increase, and vice versa. Put simply, from the 2016 tax year to now, home values have peaked during the pandemic and gone back down. However, larger homes went up higher than the average and subsequently gone down lower than the average whereas smaller homes were less volatile. In most cases, larger homes (generally wealthier people) will have a lower percentage increase than the average and smaller homes (generally less wealthy people) will have a higher percent increase if a reassessment were to happen today. This means percentage wise, smaller homes will see a greater tax increase.

If all the assessments increased, the tax rates from the municipalities will generally go down. The ultimate goal is for the municipality to get the money it needs to operate. Taxes generally go up though because municipalities need more to pay staff cost of living wage increases, pay emergency services more, etc. and with less people going to work, municipal revenue generators like parking enforcement is not increasing as it once was, there are no more speed cameras which where cash cows, etc.

Any taxation company like Ryan Canada ULC that is lobbying for unfreezing the assessments is solely self-interested in making the municipal tax base less stable, not more stable. These companies are the single largest risk to financial stability to any municipality. Don’t be fooled. They appeal assessments that can take years in court and if they are successful, tax reductions can go back 2-3 years, if not more! That means municipalities have to set aside a percentage of tax dollars to have in the coffers in cases a large refund is required.

Ryan Canada ULC is a subsidiary of a USA company, Ryan ULC, who has broken into Canada and purchased 4-5 other Canadian tax firms in the past 10 years (AEC International, PS Johnson, ArGil Property Tax, Altus Group, etc.) It has spent over $1 billion dollars doing so (the Altus Group property tax department purchase alone was for $700 million dollars). They have been public about wanting to purchase DMA Canada as well – also a USA company with a Canadian subsidiary. They want to make good on those purchases by filing tax appeals to recoup money for their investments.

At a time when we have strained relationships with the USA, why are we taking lobbying efforts from USA companies into consideration. How did the Canadian government even allow these purchases to go through with our anti-competition laws? The biggest players in property tax are now USA companies. So large that most cannot compete fairly now.

With uncertainty with our trade with the USA and tariffs, uncertainty with our interest rates, an affordability crisis, etc. the last thing we should be considering is a reassessment. The office, hotel, multi-residential, and industrial sectors may not be perfectly valued but they will survive. Let’s not focus on the rich people and REITs. Those folks are going to keep getting richer, and none of the owners of those properties are going broke. The crisis is at the residential level and as stated above, there is no inherent benefit to the lower end residential homes. It will likely be objectively worse for them all.

It’s tiring when rich (USA) companies talk about making changes to benefit other rich companies and sectors, and hide behind some sort of altruistic value of fairness, while also knowing the comparatively poor will likely not benefit. State the basis upfront and say it loud “We are a property tax company who has invested billions of dollars buying companies and we need the opportunity to appeal new values to recoup our investment. We have a large payroll right now, especially after our Altus Group purchase, and we are bleeding money. So, the only way we can continue to make millions is to lobby the government for a reassessment to help our company, and our rich client base, to get lower taxes. As for the rest of you, sorry but you are the casualties for the rich”.

At least I’d respect the hustle more. You can’t fool me though!