Roadwork being on 2nd Avenue. Photo Courtesy of Nathan Jordan/CKRW
Whitehorse, YT – The Association of Yukon Communities (AYC) says that proposed changes coming to the Canada Community Building Fund (CCBF), which aims to put federal dollars in the hands of municipalities, will leave communities without access to an important fund that is designed to help address infrastructure challenges.
The CCBF, also known as the Gas Tax Fund, allocates funding to municipalities based on a formula that considers factors such as population size and infrastructure needs. Yukon communities receive around $18 million annually through this fund with the majority of the money going to the city of Whitehorse to help with issues including the Robert Service Way escarpment.
The proposed change would seek to leverage municipalities to build housing infrastructure if they wish to use the CCBF. Ted Laking, President of the AYC, says that the change goes against the key benefits of the fund which is to help get money to municipalities quickly so that they can address issues that are specific to that community.
“If you tie all of their future infrastructure funding to the creation of housing when they aren’t experiencing rapid growth, what’s the point of just building a bunch of houses that aren’t being filled, they have other needs. They have basic water and sewer needs,” said Laking. “This is just simply a bad idea to touch this fund.”
According to Statistics Canada’s Core Public Infrastructure Survey, 14 percent of municipal waste and water infrastructure and 12 percent of transportation infrastructure is in poor or very poor condition. In a press release from the AYC, they highlight that the estimated cost of addressing all municipal assets in poor or very poor condition will cost more than $175 billion.
Laking was in Prince George, B.C., earlier this month representing the Yukon at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities board meetings where municipal leaders across the country discussed priorities before the upcoming 2024 federal budget.
One of the key recommendations that came out of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities board meetings in Prince George, B.C., earlier this month is for the federal government to double the annual funding that the fund receives to $4.4 billion and increase the annual index from 2 percent to 3.5 percent.
Although the change proposed by the federal government to lump housing incentives into the use of the CCBF would only apply to municipalities with a population of 30,000 or more, Laking says this could be a slippery slope for Yukon communities.
“What’s to prevent a future federal government from reducing that threshold, saying, ‘Well, no, we think 10,000 is the threshold now or 2000 is the limit,'” said Laking. “Communities across the country are concerned about this trajectory we’re seeing, we’re concerned about manipulating and starting to play around with the criteria around this fund.”
Laking called on the Yukon Government to listen to AYC’s concerns surrounding what they view as chronic underfunding of Yukon municipalities.
“What’s going to happen is we’re going to have we’re going to see continued degradation of services, we’re gonna see infrastructure fail, we’re going to see property taxes go up on residents in our communities. We don’t want to see that,” said Laking.
The Yukon Government previously stated that the AYC approached them asking for rural Yukon property taxes to be increased but Ted Laking said that was a misunderstanding.
