Yellowknife Pay Day Loan

What Can Local Politicians Really Change?

In a climate where municipalities are expected to provide more services with a tiny fraction of tax dollars at their disposal, on top of slashing carbon emissions, mayoral and council candidates are limited in the kinds of things they can promise and realistically deliver at election time.

Municipalities do have considerable regulatory power when it comes to things like land use planning, zoning, and bylaws, says Mark Heyck, a Yellowknife councillor who sits on the Green Municipal Fund council of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) -- especially when it comes to sustainability.

There's a whole range of on-the-ground instances where municipalities are the major driving force in advancing sustainable principles and progress. And B.C. municipalities, says Heyck, "are at the forefront of thinking sustainably."

B.C. municipalities were given more regulatory power in 2008 with the provincial government's Bill 10. It changed the local government act to give municipalities the authority to create energy and water saving bylaws.

The City of Vancouver's green homes program , for example, includes building bylaw amendments to make homes more energy efficient.

In 2009, the FCM compiled a list of green municipal bylaws.

Zoning bylaws are another important regulatory power of local governments, says Heyck. Zoning is the primary means to shape development at a neighbourhood scale (and also prevent development in other areas.)

Densification, or turning single-family homes into apartment buildings and townhouses, is a way to gain more tax revenues with relatively little outlay for local services, like water or sewer.

While increasing density is no doubt controversial, especially in Vancouver, where the city's eco-density policy has been criticized for making housing even less affordable, it's an important "carrot" to encourage green building.

In 2009, Langdale was recognized by the FCM for its affordable housing policy , which requires developers to build one in 10 houses as an affordable unit. In exchange, the city offers density bonuses and streamlined approval processes.

Payday loan firms thrive in NWT

Payday loan companies have found a profitable new home in the Northwest Territories, but some people have encountered problems with the small short-term loans that come with sky-high interest rates.

The payday loan industry is not regulated in the NWT., which has left some borrowers facing annual interest rates far above the Criminal Code limit of 60 per cent.

I had some financial difficulty — like, you know, buying a truck, paying [for] it, my kids are growing, all that. So I decided to use a small loan, Robert Drybones of Behchoko, NWT., told CBC News.

You pay your loan and you end up with [a] little bit of money, so you need money for other bills, so you start asking for a small loan again.

Interest over 1,000%

Last year, two NWT. territorial court rulings found that one Yellowknife business, Diamond Placement and Financial Services, was charging interest that amounted, in some cases, to 1,054 per cent per year.

The legal limit is 60 per cent, under Section 347 of the Criminal Code.

The court rulings also found that the company imposed additional fees ranging between $100 and $400.

In both cases, the court ruled that the loans with illegally high interest rates were invalid and, therefore, did not have to be repaid.

A lot of the payday loan users tend to be slightly lower on the income scale, although there is a broader range of incomes than you would expect, said John Lawford of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa.

Nonetheless, all of the people that were taking out payday loans had either tapped out their other forms of credit like credit cards. Theyre pretty much at the end of their own personal credit resources.

In the past few years, three of the national payday lending chains that do business in Yellowknife have settled large, multimillion-dollar lawsuits in some provinces over illegally high interest rates and fees.

As far as Im aware, almost every one of them [loans] was made at an illegal interest rate, said Paul Bennett, a Vancouver lawyer who launched one of the first class-action lawsuits against a payday loan company in Canada.

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