RECONCILIATION GRANT
From Mayor Lisa Helps Blog post January 16, 2022
This past week, the Grumpy Taxpayer$ published a blog post and sent out a newsletter with inaccurate information about the proposed reconciliation grant to the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations that Council is considering as part of our 2022 budget process. The Grumpys are calling the grant a “reconciliation tax” which it is not. But more troubling, they printed an inaccurate and misleading financial analysis of how the grant program would work.
When we pointed this out, instead of issuing a correction themselves and saying that they had made a mistake in their analysis of the amount of new assessed revenue that would go to the nations, they simply issued a follow up statement noting that the City had “clarified” the potential costs. They suggested that the City had only just released a report with the potential impact of the annual grant. In fact, this information has been public since December 9th as part of the budget report at the public Committee of the Whole meeting (Item F2).
Their follow up statement did not ensure that everyone who received the original newsletter knew their analysis was flawed. Their misrepresentation and inaccurate statement is continuing to cause confusion among media and their readers. This is unfortunate for a group that claims to be champions of transparency and accuracy.
This blog post shares the real numbers and the reason for the proposed reconciliation grant.