The BC municipal cut — 159 municipalities from official assessment statistics

2026-07-18 · wave 16 · ESTIMATE lane · Floyd's ask: run the BC analysis on BC's richer data. Source: BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs, Local Government Statistics Schedule 707 (2025 authenticated roll — official, province-wide), joined with the wave-9 measured land shares.

What was computed

Residential assessed value per resident for all 159 BC municipalities (2025 roll values ÷ 2024 BC Stats population, both in Schedule 707): BC total residential $1.87T across 5.02M municipal residents — $372,800 per person, consistent with the w8 CHSP-based figure.

The spread is 22× — wider inside BC than across Canada

(Full ranking derivable from the source file; the w8 interprovincial spread was 6× — within BC alone it is 22×.)

Aggregate community positions under the national design

Applying the measured land shares (75% metro, w9; 60% as the conservative non-metro band) to convert assessed values to land, and comparing to the $190k per-person share: a municipality's aggregate break-even sits at roughly $253k–$317k of per-capita residential assessed value.

• At the 75% share: 81 of 159 municipalities, holding 90% of BC's municipal population, sit above the line in aggregate — BC is a net-paying province in aggregate, concentrated in the Lower Mainland and resort/retirement towns.
• At the 60% share: 53 municipalities / 56% of population above.

The honesty line (do not skip): aggregate ≠ household. A municipality's holdings include landlord, investor, and entity land; renters and below-average owners within Vancouver still receive individually (w3: the condo majority receives; w9). These figures describe communities' collective positions — the politics of the container — not individual incidence.

What this teaches the container ruling (new)

The container question recurses. A provincial BC pool — proposed as the answer to "why is Saskatoon in financial relationship with Vancouver?" — would itself transfer massively from Whistler and West Vancouver to Fraser Lake and Mackenzie: the same question, one level down, at 22× instead of 6×. There is no container without an internal gradient; drawing the boundary smaller changes who the "Vancouver" and the "Saskatoon" are, it does not dissolve the relationship. This strengthens the layered design's logic (each layer of land value shared at the level that created it) and weakens "provincial pools" as a principled stopping point — provinces are as arbitrary a container as nations, just smaller. Added to analysis/container-question.md's considerations for Floyd's ruling.

Caveats

• Assessed values (July 2024 valuation for the 2025 roll) ≈ market but not identical; residential class only; municipal populations exclude unincorporated areas (~9% of BC).
• Land share applied from w9's Vancouver measurement (75%) and a 60% band — municipality-specific shares would tighten this (each municipality's roll would need a w9-style pull; queued selectively).
• Per-capita municipal aggregates are community positions, not household incidence (stated above; repeated because it will be misquoted).

Sources

1. BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs, Local Government Statistics, Schedule 707 (2025): assessments by class, tax rates, and population per municipality. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/british-columbians-our-governments/local-governments/finance/local-government-statistics/schedule707_2025.xlsx (retrieved and parsed 2026-07-18; residential-class rows).
2. Land shares: analysis/vancouver-land-share.md (w9, measured).
3. Allowance: analysis/household-incidence.md (w3).

Groundshare — a proposal in open development. Every number traces to a cited public source with its retrieval date; corrections are published, not erased. Rebuilt 2026-07-19 from the repo's research files.