CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: A Visitor Tax for Port Sable Debate

Each summer, Port Sable’s population of 4,000 roughly triples as tourists descend on its beaches, lighthouse and seafood restaurants. Council now contemplates a municipal accommodation tax adding 3 percent to every night in a hotel, inn, campground or short-term rental, or just over five dollars on a $180 room. Staff project annual revenue of about $600,000. Several larger Canadian cities already impose such a charge, and revised provincial rules now permit smaller towns to follow.

Mayor Elaine Cormier regards the tax as correcting an imbalance. Property taxes finance the public washrooms, additional garbage collection and lifeguards on which visitors depend. “Our year-round residents are subsidizing everyone else’s vacation,” she contends. She would allocate half the proceeds to spring and fall promotion, when local businesses languish, and half to heavily used services.

Gilles Arsenault, proprietor of the six-room Gull Point Inn, remains skeptical. Families booking in July are financially stretched, he maintains, and scrutinize prices to the dollar. “If Port Sable costs more than Cape Morrow up the road, some of them will drive the extra twenty minutes.” A regional tax collected along the entire coast, he admits, would dissolve most of his objection. He would also feel easier seeing the revenue materialize “in a new boardwalk, not in a line of a budget nobody reads.”

Dr. Nadia Rahman, a provincial university specialist in tourism economics, considers anxieties about lost bookings largely overblown. Comparable taxes, the research suggests, seldom redirect travellers, for whom scenery, beaches and restaurants weigh far more than several dollars. The genuine hazard, she cautions, comes afterward: “Once the money arrives, there is always pressure to use it to plug holes in the general budget.” Her remedy is a bylaw that legally reserves the revenue for tourism and mandates a published report annually.

Bev Doucette, a Front Street resident for over fifty years, welcomes the tax yet sees no reason to advertise a community whose streets already congest every August. “Visitors should instead contribute toward the wear and tear,” she insists, citing cracked sidewalks and a rental housing shortage she attributes partly to short-term rentals. Every dollar, in her estimation, belongs in roads and residents’ housing.

For twelve years I have rented a Port Sable cottage every July, so this tax is aimed squarely at people like me. Contrary to Mr. Arsenault’s fears, 6. Choose…a minor charge seldom changes plansthe charge would fall on residentsthe revenue would stay in tourismCape Morrow would soon follow suit, at least if my family is typical. And awkward as it is to admit, the mayor’s case is hard to rebut: 7. Choose…the off-season is slowrentals have squeezed residentsvisitors wear out the sidewalksresidents pay for my vacation.

What worries me is Ms. Doucette’s plan to 8. Choose…promote the town off-seasonspend it all on residentsban short-term rentals outrightreserve it for tourism by law. Here I’m with the innkeeper: what I want to see is 9. Choose…cheaper July roomsthe mayor’s advertisingsomething you can walk onan annual public report. And the economist’s second safeguard, 10. Choose…a yearly reporta regional levya legal reservation of revenuea lower rate, would cost next to nothing. A tax I can see at work is a tax I will gladly pay.