Oil rebate change big surprise

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

Changes to the oil tax rebate are an unexpected - and unwelcome - “monkeywrench” for homeowners and oil sellers.

Murray Salsman of Grafton looked at his October oil bill after a 100-gallon fill-up only to discover he’s paying the full 13 per cent tax on the cost. “Five tanks - that’s $150 extra in tax a year,” he says.

He has qualified in the past couple of years for the eight per cent oil tax provincial rebate, but what was an automatic process took a twist this fall. “We got the letter from Service Nova Scotia October 20,” Lorna Rawding says. She’s the office manager for Sawlor Fuels in Somerset, and they filled up Salsman’s tank.

The letter tells oil sellers to check a provided website and enter in customers’ civic addresses before delivery. The system makes note of people with resource-assessed property, and they no longer qualify for the rebate. “It’s now a couple of us working extra hours to keep up,” Rawding says. “It’s not at all what we needed - a monkeywrench in what work we thought we’d get done.”

And a big surprise for customers. Salsman says he’s learned 40,000 properties no longer meet the rebate standard, and owners will now have to fill out an application. “And will I even get it?” he wonders. “When will I get it back? It’s more money for the government to have use of, and it’s mine. “It’s crooked and underhanded,” he says, just because he lives on the old family property with 10 acres of woods around the house, he doesn’t get the rebate. A town half-acre lot likely would automatically.

Rawding says, too, the provincially-provided website only includes assessment information on civic addresses for customers getting deliveries, but doesn’t indicate whether that same customer owns any other land. Sawlor Fuels has provided rebate applications to some of its customers, and information on where to get them to others.

Salsman wrote NDP leader Darrell Dexter about the rebate change and his concerns, and Dexter passed on those questions to government in the Legislature October 30. “This is hugely important for rural Nova Scotians, as so many live on larger pieces of land and part of that may be resource - and, in most cases, is not even being used,” he said in an interview the next day. “This is heaping a lot of red tape on rural residents, particularly seniors, and resulting in a lot of applications that will have to be processed just to clear up a mistake.”

Dexter says there was no advance notice from government how the database system would work, and not taking tax from someone “is not a rebate. “That’s an odd concept - we don’t tax the air we breathe, so is it a rebate? We should be taking this tax off when this commodity is being sold for home heating.”