Strathcona Neighbors Launch Tax Strike in Vancouver

I have some more information about the tax strike in Vancouver, where residents of a neighborhood are protesting the government’s negligence in addressing homelessness and concerns around a homeless encampment there:

• This CTV News story gives us a summary of what’s going on.
• The neighbors have signed on to a Declaration of Tax Resistance in Demand of Community Safety that reads in part: “we, the undersigned Strathcona homeowners, declare our intention to withhold property tax payments to the City of Vancouver — by way of deferral, assessment appeal, or other lawful means — until such time as our municipal, provincial, and federal governments act together or individually to meet the following… demands.”
• The neighbors have also organized a petition (with over 550 signatories last I looked) in which the signers “hereby state our support for Strathcona homeowners who intend to withhold property tax payments”.

In other news:

• A report on the 15^th International Conference on War Tax Resistance and Peace Tax Campaigns has been published.
• The National Front of Catalonia is skeptical about the calls to tax resistance coming out of the Council for the Republic, noting that it had failed to stand behind tax resisters in the past who had responded to such calls. Essentially: Catalan patriots took the tax resistance seriously, but their politicians only meant it rhetorically. In addition, the call for resistance seems to have been an eleventh-hour afterthought, being issued just as tax returns were coming due, and too late for most taxpayers to prepare the groundwork for effective resistance.
• The number of people renouncing their U.S. citizenship is shooting up again. Each of the first two quarters of 2020 have had more official expatriates than any other quarter since record-keeping began (however there were unusually low numbers in the last two quarters of 2019, so this may be an artifact of some glitch in the bureaucracy). This in spite of the fact that the U.S. now charges thousands of dollars to people who want to relinquish their citizenship.