Policy Forum: Taxation of Machinery and Equipment and Linear Property in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Municipalities in Alberta collected $1.75 billion from the taxation of machinery and equipment and linear property (MELP) in 2013. MELP taxes are fixed charges that reduce cash flow and increase the cost of new investments in oil sands projects, unconventional and conventional oil and gas developments, and pipelines. The distribution of the MELP tax base is highly concentrated among a few municipal districts and specialized municipalities, with the top 10 municipalities accounting for 56 percent of the $113.7 billion in equalized MELP assessment in 2013. Four municipalities collected more than $10,000 per capita in municipal property taxes in 2013, with the Municipal District of Opportunity, population 3,061, receiving the largest amount, $21,329 per capita. In addition to the disparities in the per capita assessments, some municipalities have taken advantage of the presence of fixed, location-specific, MELP investments to impose very high non-residential mill rates, so as to collect additional tax revenues. Provincial policies regarding MELP taxation should be reviewed, given the concentration of MELP tax revenues in a few municipalities and the negative impact that these taxes can have on investment in the oil and gas industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".