Saint John — This year, 2017, is the first that Irving Oil is scheduled to pay their full taxes on the Canaport LNG site to the City of Saint John. Conveniently, this year the province also assessed the value of the property at a bafflingly low $98 million, down from $300M. This means the Irvings will save about $5.5M that would have gone back into the city.
According to several secret sources at Irving, the reason the property was assessed so low this year is that employees were “asked” to urinate and defecate on the property just before the value assessment was scheduled to take place.
“They called us to this top-secret meeting and told us in no uncertain terms that, if we wanted to keep our jobs, we were to pee and take a big old dump on the property,” said one employee on condition of anonymity. “They closed the bathrooms to make extra sure we would do our duty, so to speak.”
The employee shuddered, then added: “I knew I was working for a disgusting company, but this is a whole new low.”
Employees were also up for big promotions if they went “above and beyond” the call of duty by finding creative ways to bring down the property value during the assessment.
“In that meeting they told us that they would ‘look the other way’ if we wanted to, say, get really drunk and vomit outside while the tax assessor was here — bonus points for smashing our beer bottles on the pavement — or if we wanted to drag our old broken-down couches and junk cars onto the property,” confided another anonymous Irving employee. “And actually, we could be up for promotions if we did this on our own accord.
“I guess that’s why they asked me in my job interview if I considered myself to be a creative person.”
Other employees told The Manatee that during the meeting, bosses used a slideshow of charts and graphs to demonstrate exactly how much “waste” would be needed to cut the tax value of the property.
“It was all very scientific,” said another interviewee. “They told us to eat even more Irving convenience store food and chug more of their tar-like coffee to ‘help get things moving.’ I’ve never been so disturbed.”
We managed to contact Irving officials, who would only say that our allegations were nothing but “a load of crap” that really “pissed them off.”