Quote:
Originally Posted by DBaz
Can you provide a reference for that please. This CBC article states it is $260 million per year. The amount for road infrastructure does not include street maintenance for municipal infrastructure.
Much of the bike infrastructure is paid for through municipal property taxes, which everybody has paid into, including bicycle riders.
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I find it a little confusing, personally. Perhaps somebody with accounting prowess can straighten this out.
Since no accountants are stepping up to explain this (
), here's what I get, from diving into the numbers a little (from 2022 data):
Net total litres of gasoline sold in NS: 1,236,232,000 litres X 19.25 ¢/litre (provincial fuel tax on gasoline) =
$237,974,660 (NS gasoline tax revenue)
Net total litres of diesel sold in NS: 415,788,000 X 19.55 ¢/litre (provincial fuel tax on diesel) =
$81,286,554 (NS diesel tax revenue)
There's some propane used as fuel as well, but for this purpose it's negligible.
Source for fuel tax rates
Source for NS fuel sales for 2022
Add those revenues together and you get
$319,261,214, which differs from the number given in the article (I have no idea why).
On top of that, the highway plan linked in one of the above posts states:
Quote:
Provincial – Highway funding in Nova Scotia includes all revenues
collected through provincial fuel taxes and registration of motor vehicles,
as well as other funding provided by the provincial government.
Almost every dollar from Registry of Motor Vehicle (RMV) fees and
the fuel tax goes back into provincial roads.
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So, from
the provincial budget, revenues from the Registry of Motor Vehicles is:
$135,816,000.
Add the RMV revenue to the fuel tax revenue and you get:
$455,077,214.
On top of that, there is money that comes from the federal government, and some cost-sharing from municipal governments. I don't have data for that.
Over and above, if one considers the HST (15%) on gasoline and diesel fuel, there's a ton more revenue coming into the budget directly from the sale of fuels. I don't have data on that, nor am I aware of the breakdown of what is taxed and what isn't (though I'm aware that in some cases there is tax on tax), let's just assume an average price of $1.50 per litre would include roughly $0.20 of HST. For the sake of simplicity, adding up the net total litres of gas and diesel (currently diesel is more expensive, but oh well) = 1,652,010,000 litres ---> HST collected might roughly be
$330,402,000.
Not sure how much of that HST (federal or provincial component) would be diverted directly to road infrastructure, but if you look at revenue sources from motor vehicle registration and taxes on fuel, it looks like it's roughly in the neighbourhood of
$785,000,000 give or take (plus any errors or misinterpretations I could have made). Unless I've made some grave error, it appears that motor vehicle owners/operators pay more than enough directly from motor vehicle ownership/usage to cover road infrastructure expenses.
I'm not sure why my numbers are not the same as those quoted by the provincial finance minister, nor do know why the article states that the tax is 15.5 ¢/litre when the federal document that I linked to above states that it's 19.25 ¢/litre for gasoline and 19.55 ¢/litre for diesel (the article doesn't differentiate).