If anyone has the right to question Flin Flon’s campaign to tax cottage country, it’s Ingi Bjornson.
Bjornson lives in a remote log home 25 minutes away, visits town just once a week and is geographically closer to Cranberry Portage than to Flin Flon.
But in the bitter, long-running dispute between the City of Flin Flon and area cottagers, Bjornson is something of a mythical creature: a cottager who not only wants to pay taxes to Flin Flon, but already does.
“We’re all interconnected – we’re a community,” he says by way of explanation.
It’s that sort of viewpoint that city council was no doubt hoping to encounter more often when it first broached the subject of municipal fees for area cottagers more than two years ago.
Yet while his neighbours have largely rejected council’s overtures, Bjornson has stood so firmly behind his principles that he voluntarily pays taxes to the City of Flin Flon.
Technically they’re not taxes, since the city has no jurisdiction to tax anyone outside of its borders. Nonetheless, Bjornson has for the past two years mailed the municipality a cheque for $500.
He pledges to continue to do so each year until – or more accurately if – some form of revenue begins flowing from cottage country into municipal coffers.
Bjornson stresses that he neither seeks nor expects any services in return for his dollars.
“It’s a way of showing support for the [municipal] leadership here,” he says, “because they’re up against a tough, tough road here. And they get a lot of flack.”
Tall, fit and uncommonly friendly, Bjornson is one of those harmlessly eccentric bushmen who covets nature the way most of society craves wealth.
He has only a Grade 10 education, but he is knowledgeable, thoughtful and worldly. He has even written several self-published books with titles such as I Have Heard of This Fair Land Called Heaven and The Trickling Waters Spoke of a Great Upheaval.
Neso Lake is not only Bjornson’s home, but also his workplace. He and his wife operate Neso Lake Adventures, a modest wilderness camp that carries the slogan: “We’re so small, if you steal a towel, we’ll know who the thief is!”
Given his nature-centric lifestyle, Bjornson has only casually followed the back-and-forth around whether cottagers near Flin Flon bear a duty to financially support the cash-strapped municipality.
About a year and a half ago, after hearing some fellow cottagers refer to city councillors as idiots, Bjornson wrote to the city to make the unusual request that his property be taxed but provided no services.
“Why would I demand more services if the money pot is shrinking?” Bjornson says. “It doesn’t make sense. So [the letter asked for] increased taxation, no additional services, lest I be a burden to our children and grandchildren down the road.”
Bjornson drew up a self-styled contract in which he agreed to pay $500 a year to Flin Flon. When the city sent him receipts, he burnt them, refusing to accept a write-off for his gift.
Out at scenic Neso Lake, Bjornson is an extremely self-sufficient man. One gets the sense that if you dropped him in the middle of the forest and returned one year later, you’d find him not only alive, but full of laughter.
Be that as it may, Bjornson has no problem conceding that even a bushman like himself relies on Flin Flon to an extent.
“Everything,” he says when asked what municipal services he uses. “Roads to get there, groceries, fuel, library. I’ve never seen a game of hockey in my life. The swimming hole is right here by the camp, so I don’t use a swimming hole in Flin Flon. But we’re all interconnected.”
So what exactly are those Flin Flon services worth to a cottager? Bjornson says he trusts the city to devise a fair amount.
“I asked for increased taxation, no additional services, the amount of sacrifice as is required without being a burden to the city or our children and grandchildren – whatever that amount is,” he says.
Bjornson sees the cottage-city debate as part of a broader trend in which the majority of Canadian society now, in his view, seeks to take rather than to give.
“When that line is crossed, a decline begins,” he says prophetically.
It’s arguable whether most Canadians are indeed takers. Certainly many cottagers will argue that they already pay a premium for their lifestyle, and would welcome user fees for any Flin Flon services they use.
Bjornson may have a unique outlook on just about everything, but he’s under no illusions that most cottagers side with his pro-tax stance.
“I think overall I will not win the majorital love of the cabin owners, because historically not many people are in favour of increased taxation, especially with no additional services,” he says.
Asked whether he risks being ostracized by his neighbours, Bjornson turns characteristically philosophical. He quotes Gandhi: “Be the change you want the world to be.”
Resistance may have made Gandhi a legend, but Bjornson’s one small act of taxpaying defiance is unlikely to bridge the negotiating gap between cottagers and the city.
After all, council has now failed three times to extract revenue from cottage country.
First, cottagers rejected an $882 annual service fee proposed by council. They similarly dismissed a $300 fee for fire protection, which the city discontinued in mid-2013.
The latest blow to council came when the provincial government recently turned down a request to amalgamate cottage subdivisions with Flin Flon in the same way that smaller Manitoba municipalities have been forced to merge.
That appears to leave council with one final option: applying to the province to annex cottage subdivisions and make them a taxpaying part of Flin Flon.
If council successfully takes that step, Bjornson, with his sprawling, multi-building lakefront property, would likely be handed a tax bill in the multiple thousands of dollars.
Bjornson, who says he currently pays $850 a year to the province, considers himself the richest man alive by virtue of his connection to nature.
But could his bank account absorb the financial impact of annexation?
“I don’t lose any sleep,” Bjornson says. “Sacrifice has to start somewhere.”
