NEW FEES TAKE A BITE

Citizens watch carefully as government budgets come together, anxious to see where tax rates will land. While tax rates get the headlines, there is another way that agencies raise funds, and that is through fees. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that these fees also take dollars directly out of the pockets of hardworking taxpayers.

Two Saskatoon city councillors are calling out their local airport authority for tacking on a fee to people taking a taxi from the airport. They say this was done without consultation or transparency with the public.

Councillors Darren Hill and Troy Davies want to know why a new $2 fee is applied to everyone arriving at or leaving the airport in a taxi in Saskatoon.

As Hill quite correctly pointed out in a story by Postmedia’s Alex Macpherson, “They’re looking at this as an additional revenue stream on the backs of the users of the airport … and I don’t think that’s fair. They already have that significant revenue stream coming from the airport improvement fee.”

Outbound passengers are already charged an airport improvement fee of $5 for travel within Saskatchewan and $20 for trips outside the province.

The authority, known as Skyxe, answers to federal authorities, but should be more clearly communicating with local government and its customers.

Moving now to the provincial government, new fees have come into effect that could affect the accessibility of court records to people with limited financial means. It now costs $1 per page to have photocopies made — double the former cost — and $20 just to look at a file.

Some accommodations have been made for having fees waived for reasons of hardship. Fee-waiver certificates are available to clients of Legal Aid and pro bono law organizations, as well as those on social assistance or living below the low-income cutoff. They allow holders to avoid all of the new and changed fees. The fees are high enough, however, that not only people on social assistance or what is considered “low income” could find the fees a barrier to accessing public records.

The government needs to be open to feedback on how the public actually feels about these increases.

The Supreme Court has ruled that provincial governments must not raise court fees so much as to impede access to the courts and the documents involved. This needs to be assessed now that we are a few months into the change.

Increases in fees, and the effect they can have on quality of life, should be taken seriously and be re-evaluated as necessary.