Thursday June 2, 2011
The taxman goes to the Breezeway
Posted by John Gushue
Given the thousands - make that tens of thousands - of students who have walked through its doors over the last four decades, the Breezeway at Memorial University is arguably one of the best-known bars in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The bar has changed over the years. The dimly lit pub in the old TSC is no more; the Breezeway is now a not-particularly-well-lit pub in the student centre. It definitely is missing some of the old ambience.
There’s no doubt that the Breezeway is a bar. What’s been in contention in a long-running dispute is whether the bar should be exempt from municipal tax.
The Memorial University Students’ Union, which owns the bar, felt so strongly about the matter that it fought it right to Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador.
And it lost.
In a decision released Wednesday, Justice James Adams found that the Breezeway is not exempt from both property tax and business tax. Further, other money-generating enterprises run by the student union (a copy centre and another place called the Attic) must pay the municipal business tax.
How much money is on the line? That remains to be seen.
One excerpt from Adams’s decision jumped out:
The Students’ Union has argued in the alternative that if I find that it is subject to business tax then I should set the tax rate at zero. Even if I were inclined to do so (which I am not), I find that I have no authority to set the business tax rate for the City.
