2024-04-04 14:11:26
(Quebec) Visitors to the Magdalen Islands will have to pay a tourist fee of $30 per person starting this summer. The municipality ensures that the sums collected will be used to improve infrastructure for tourists, but also to pay for waste management, which increases in high season.
Posted at 10:11 a.m.
This fee is implemented in a context where municipalities are seeking by all means to increase their revenue. The Quebec government gave them the opportunity to collect royalties in 2017.
“Thanks to the payment of the Archipel Pass, visitors will support the preservation of the natural environment of the archipelago and the improvement of recreational tourism infrastructure,” assured the mayor of the Islands, Antonin Valiquette, in a press release released Thursday.
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Antonin Valiquette, mayor of the Magdalen Islands
The $30 fee must be paid by visitors between May 1 and October 14. Residents and owners of secondary homes are excluded. Children 12 and under too. A maximum of $100 per family has been decreed.
The municipality argues that since the average stay in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine is on average 10 nights, the fee “therefore represents a sum of $3 per day to benefit from all that the Islands have to offer”. The archipelago receives 70,000 tourists every year.
The collection of the tax will be done on an online platform which will be launched on May 1. “The visitor will pay for their Archipel Pass via a secure payment platform generating a confirmation QR code which will be validated when leaving the territory,” we can read on the municipality’s website.
What will happen to reluctant tourists? The municipality warns that they will be liable to a fine under a municipal by-law. The final draft regulations for the fee must be adopted at a city council meeting next week.
The sums collected must be injected into a brand new Sustainable Territorial Management Fund. The Fund will be used to “ensure the provision of quality recreational tourism services and infrastructure in a fragile territory”.
The municipality of Percé also tried to implement a tourist fee under the new powers granted by Quebec. The measure was, however, successfully challenged in court by traders, who were responsible for collecting it.
The Superior Court had decreed that municipalities might not have the fee collected by others, unless they had their agreement. However, several merchants in Percé were opposed to the one dollar fee that they were required to collect on each $20 of purchases made by visitors.
In the case of the Islands, it seems that the establishment of a payment platform avoids this pitfall.
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