ATLANTIC CANADA ASSESSMENT: JURISDICTIONAL UPDATE Nicole McAninch A.I.M.A., A.I.C. Candidate Introduction: Property assessment plays a crucial role in determining property taxes and ensuring fair distribution of tax burdens among property owners. In Atlantic Canada, the provinces of New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island each have their own systems for property assessment. This jurisdictional update provides a summary of the current state of property assessment in Atlantic Canada. New Brunswick: In New Brunswick, property assessments are conducted by Service New Brunswick on an annual basis. Changes are underway in an effort to the modernize property assessment system in New Brunswick. Notably, effective 2025, we are looking at a proposed amendment to the base date legislation. Historically, this is the only jurisdiction where the base date is January 1st of the effective taxation year, however this legislation is about to change, whereby the base date for the 2025 tax year will be set to Jan 1, 2024. Theoretically, this change should provide for a higher level of accuracy in values as the assessment authority should have a greater opportunity to gather and analyze data in preparation of the roll. With this, Service New Brunswick will no longer be issuing assessment notices in October, and all property assessment notices were mailed out to owners on January 15th, 2024This reassessment amounts to an overall assessment base increase of $8.4 billion across the province. New Brunswick is also unique in that it is the only jurisdiction that continues to work without a legislated equity provision, inherently creating a lack of fairness for rate payers in the province. While there appears to be no plan to add such provisions, this is a topic of discussion among stakeholders.
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The 2022 implementation of the Spike Protection Mechanism (SMP), designed to mitigate the impact of market value increases on non-residential property assessments has been approved for 2024. The program effectively caps the taxable assessment of property at a 10% increase over the previous years’ value. SPM has been in place for qualifying owner-occupied properties since 2013. In 2022, the government introduced a temporary tax relief program mimicking the SPM for 4+ unit apartments and nonresidential properties, with the same exceptions, for 2022 and 2023 tax years. The program was extended and expanded in 2024 to include all properties. For all 3 years this was/will be processed as a tax credit to qualifying property owners. This 3-year temporary program was not legislated.
