Cherry growers aim for a sweeter victory

Sunday, October 18, 2009

by SUSAN MANN

Three tart cherry-grower owners of Norfolk Cherry Company Ltd. near Simcoe won a partial victory earlier this month in their fight to change the property tax assessment on their pitting operation.

Marshall Schuyler says they received a letter two weeks ago from the provincial finance ministry’s office saying the facility and the land it sits on will be classified as farmland starting with this year. It had been assessed a combination of industrial-commercial since 1998 when Ontario’s property tax system was reformed. Schuyler and the co-owners of the company, Ken Porteous and Terry Shaw, saw their taxes more than double because of the assessment change to industrial-commercial.

Even though this assessment adjustment is good news, Schuyler says, the three want to convince the ministry to make the assessment class retroactive to 1998 and get a refund for the portion of taxes that were based on the industrial-commercial assessment. Schuyler says he doesn’t know how much that is because he hasn’t done all of the calculations.

Schuyler says their tax problem highlights the bigger picture in agriculture of a grey area surrounding how farming operations are being defined for property tax treatment. “Where’s the line between farming and some of these other activities? If you’re packing peaches in the Niagara Peninsula in your facility is that a commercial/industrial activity or is that a farm activity?”

Ontario Federation of Agriculture vice-president Mark Wales says the problem is the Assessment Act, which establishes the rules for the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation’s assessments, doesn’t contain a definition of primary agriculture. The Corporation assesses all Ontario properties.

Effort was made to develop a definition for value-retention activities in 2005 by an industry-government working group made up of government, farm groups, agricultural industry associations and the Corporation.

The principle of the definition is buildings used by farmers to do what must be done to their crop to get it to their normal market should be assessed as agricultural. For example, buildings used by greenhouse or mushroom growers to pack their own products should be assessed as agricultural.
 
It was a very flexible definition and the Corporation liked it, says Wales. But it’s up to the finance ministry — not the Corporation — to initiate changes in the appropriate legislation.

The finance ministry has refused “to even meet us to discuss it and hopefully change the regulation,” Wales says. “They have chosen only to deal with these things one at a time when they blow up in their face.” BF