Municipal officials should work harder to find delinquent owners
To the Expositor:
All property owners in Ontario, particularly in the Township of Northeastern Manitoulin and the Islands (NEMI), should be aware that their property can be sold by municipal authorities, without their knowledge or consent. Recently we came perilously close to having it happen to us and without the aid of a perfect stranger we would have lost everything the family has built over the last 40 years.
The property in question was the family cottage and adjacent lot that are currently registered in the name of my daughter. Six years ago years ago she and her family moved from their residence in New York to London, England. At that time, she sent out all the change of address cards to the relevant authorities including NEMI. They continued to receive all the bills associated with the property and paid them accordingly. This process was repeated four years ago when they moved back to New York. She continued to receive bills for the cottage but failed to notice that the NEMI tax bills were not among them. There is no doubt she should have noticed this error but busy people rarely try to pay bills they do not receive.
Four years passed and then this spring she received a phone call from a private individual who was aware of our problem and had taken his personal time and effort to track us down. He told her that in eight days our cottage was to be sold for unpaid taxes and if we did not get the money to NEMI within the week the cottage would be lost to us forever. Fortunately, she was able to act quickly and the disaster was averted but upon enquiry with municipal authorities we learned some very disturbing facts.
They said that they had done everything required by Ontario law but as it turns out, not one bit more. They sent out the tax notices via regular mail to the last known address of our daughter. This was probably the out-of-date London address so either they had made a mistake in their files or they had not received the change of address card. Whatever the case, the notices went out into the void and were never received or returned. After the third year of unpaid taxes the municipal authorities turned the file over to a lawyer who apparently made one attempt to find our daughter and then started the process to have the property sold. This attempt was supposedly a registered letter to the last known address of the person on the title. This must have been returned to the sender because it never reached my daughter but once again nothing extra was done by anyone to try and find her. To add insult to injury in all of this, the final bill included over $3,500 interest and penalties and a further $3,500 for the legal fees!
Obviously we bear some of the responsibility for the situation but what really bothers me is that as taxpayers we employ the municipal authorities in charge of the tax office. They made no effort whatsoever to try and find us over and above the minimum required by law. There is no doubt the provincial law needs to be changed so that more effort has to be put into finding the delinquent taxpayer but until that happens we should at least demand that the tax office staff do much more to track the owner down. In our case they could have looked us up in the telephone book, where we are listed, and made a call. They could have come to the property to talk to us or posted a notice on the door indicating the problem. They could have contacted the neighbours to see if they could get our address that way. They could have done any number of things but they chose to nothing but the minimum. When I was running a company in Calgary any employee who deliberately chose to do only the minimum job, no matter what the circumstances, was fired and replaced by someone who really cared for our investors and customers and was willing to make an extra effort if the situation required it. I think we should expect the same from our employees in the municipal office.
The final disturbing aspect of the whole situation is that we were not alone. Apparently there were 12 other properties to be sold for back taxes by NEMI last year. I do not know what happened to them but next year there are 72 more to be sold! Be careful, yours may be one of them.
Sincerely, a very upset taxpayer,
Ed Pinchin
Ten Mile Point and Bragg Creek, Alberta
