Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.I run an accommodation business in Nipigon, Ontario. Like most small business owners, I and my meagre staff sweep the floors, change the lightbulbs, reconcile the books, and greet guests after long days because that is what it takes to keep the doors open. What I never signed up for, and never consented to, was becoming an unpaid tax collector for the Township. Yet they enacted a bylaw that demands I, and my staff, do so. Every motel and short-term rental must now calculate, collect, hold, and remit a Municipal Accommodation Tax (MAT) while absorbing all administrative costs. The penalty for refusing is fines and interest. There is no opt-out, and most importantly, there is no compensation.I went to court to challenge this. I argued a principle that should be self-evident: in a free society, nobody should be compelled to perform labour for the state without fair compensation. Judges, clerks, lawyers, and municipal staff are all paid for their work. A specific case in point, and one I described to the judge, is that of Property Tax. The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, an Ontario Crown Corporation, decides what a home or business is assessed at. They all get paid. The municipality has its employees prepare the tax invoices and manage the collection of those taxes. They all get paid. .FLETCHER: Orange Shirt Day guilt industry running out of control.Why should small business owners, forced into government service, be the only ones expected to work for free? The judge’s answer was devastatingly narrow. Because the law does not explicitly require municipalities to compensate providers, the court would not create that right. Case dismissed.Some will shrug and say it is just a small tax, but administration is work. Anyone who runs a business knows that new compliance duties eat up hours and dollars, hours that cannot be spent serving customers, and dollars that cannot be spent hiring staff, maintaining rooms, or lowering rates to be competitive. In larger chains, head office absorbs the pain. In small towns, it is the owner and a handful of employees doing double duty. We are told this is a “civic obligation,” as if it were the same as jury duty: brief, rare, and state-managed. It is not. This is continuous, transaction by transaction, and entirely outsourced to private hands. International standards define forced labour as work exacted under menace of penalty and not offered voluntarily. That is the plain reality here. Refuse, and you are penalized. There is no voluntariness, and there is no compensation. There is only the command and the cost..If this policy had been hammered out with public input and industry consultation, the outcome might have looked different. It wasn’t. The by-law was shepherded by a council built on appointments, not elections, with key steps handled in-camera, behind closed doors. Accommodation providers were given an “information session,” but no meaningful plan for how MAT would actually deliver more visitors. Every local provider signed a petition opposing implementation under these terms. It was ignored. When I raised this democratic deficit in court, I was told I lacked evidence. Of course I did, because the very processes that would supply it were conducted in secret. That is a closed loop: hide the records and then dismiss critics for not having them. If you wonder why cynicism takes root, start there..WENZEL: Carney’s green dreams collide with cold realities.The Ontario Superior Court’s reasoning turned on legislative silence. The Municipal Act authorizes the tax and the regime; it does not speak about compensating those compelled to administer it. From the bench, that silence meant no right to compensation. This is the flaw that should alarm every small business in Canada. If the legislature fails to protect you, the courts will not. They will not weigh fairness. They will not consider the obvious analogy that municipal staff who collect property taxes are paid while private businesses are not. They will not recognize that compelled work is still work, even when cloaked in the rhetoric of civic duty. The message is stark that unless the law hand-writes your dignity into the margins, you do not have it.More than a century and a half ago, Frédéric Bastiat wrote The Law. He warned that when government uses the force of law to take from some and transfer to others, it becomes legal plunder. Nipigon’s MAT regime is a textbook example. The Township found a revenue stream and the cheapest way to collect it: outsource the labour to small businesses and pay them nothing. Staff who process property taxes get a wage and benefits while we get orders and penalties. That is cost-shifting by statute, not partnership, and it corrodes the very idea that law should protect the equal dignity of persons..Supporters will argue that government can require duties of citizens. True. But the classic examples such as jury duty and limited emergency service are bounded, public, and supervised by the state. Collecting a continuous municipal tax on every booking, month after month, is qualitatively different. It is an ongoing administrative function of the municipality, executed at the private expense of businesses that never wanted it, never volunteered, yet cannot refuse. The fact that the duty is imposed by by-law does not transform the nature of the work. Renaming a mandatory charge a ‘donation’ doesn’t make it voluntary or charitable.One reason we are here is Canada’s constitutional blind spot around economic liberty. The Charter protects life, liberty, security of the person, and equality, but courts have consistently refused to treat the right to earn a living or the right to fair compensation for compelled labour as core Charter interests. Even our “security of person”, at least so far, when it came to the Covid response, has similarly been denied us. That may be doctrinally tidy, but it is practically incoherent. .EDITORIAL: If Nenshi says the pornographic books are fine in school libraries, bring them to the mic.A society that says work equals dignity then turns around and declares the dignity of small business owners purely discretionary, contingent on whether the legislature remembered to write it down. I am not saying the Charter guarantees a wage for every civic duty. I am saying that when government outsources a continuing administrative function to private citizens, with penalties for refusal, courts should scrutinize that arrangement as something more than a benign civic obligation. There is a line between the common good and conscription. MAT crosses it.We were told MAT would mean more heads in beds. That is a good slogan but it is not a plan. Local operators asked for concrete detail: what programs, what marketing, what targets, what accountability? Instead, we got a collection system first, and a vision later — maybe. .The nearby community of Terrace Bay enacted a MAT for their accommodation providers in 2020. At the “information session” in 2023, a representative was there to provide supportive evidence for their program. Three years after implementation, the representative admitted that while money was collected, not one concrete activity had been launched to increase stays. Yet the independent “tourism entity” got 50% of the money raised and spent it on nothing concrete other than paying the salaries of its employees. The uncomfortable truth is that MAT revenue can become just another pot of money with diffuse accountability, especially when oversight is entangled with local relationships and appointments. If you want a partnership with business, you start with transparency and consent, not secrecy and compulsion.Some will dismiss this as a tiny-town squabble. They shouldn’t. The logic that carried the day in court — that if the statute is silent, your labour is free — scales to any jurisdiction that wants to shift administrative costs off the public ledger and onto private backs. And a lot of municipalities have jumped on the bandwagon, not because they believe it will work but because it is another source of revenue where the legislation makes sure even unwilling victims of the proposed help receive little to none. Today it is MAT. Tomorrow it is another fee, reporting regime, or levy collected by “designated providers” under penalty. If you run a restaurant, a shop, a bed-and-breakfast, ask yourself how many hours you can surrender before your business model collapses. Then ask why the government gets those hours for free..EDITORIAL: The assassination of Charlie Kirk: The Left’s war on dissent.There is a simple, principled fix. If municipalities want private businesses to administer a tax, they should either pay for the work through a clear, published administration fee, or permit providers to deduct a reasonable percentage to cover their costs. Pair that with genuine consultation, public oversight of spending, and performance targets tied to tourism outcomes. If MAT truly drives value, prove it — and compensate the people doing the paperwork.I have joined a national small-business advocacy group to push for provincial reform. I will keep pressing for transparency and fair dealing in my community. I will keep saying, without apology, that compelled unpaid labour is wrong, whether you dress it up as partnership or hide it inside a by-law. And I am asking readers — business owners, employees, and citizens — to demand the same from your councils and your MPPs. Freedom is not only the absence of chains. It is the right to control your labour, to say yes or no, and to be fairly compensated when the answer is yes. When law forgets that, it stops being protection and becomes plunder. Nipigon has reminded us how quickly that can happen. The remedy will not come from the courthouse. It will come from people who refuse to mistake compulsion for duty and who insist that government, at every level, treat their time with the same respect it grants its own.Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.
