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Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart continued to ring the alarm about Vancouver’s fiscal situation at his weekly COVID-19 update on Wednesday.

“We are not ‘on the verge of bankruptcy,’ as some media outlets reported over the weekend,” Stewart said, before clarifying how quickly the city would, in fact, drain its emergency funds if homeowners begin to default on their property taxes.

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“If even one in four homeowners end up defaulting on their property taxes that would mean an additional loss of $325 million in revenues,” Stewart said. “We simply don’t have the reserves to deal with a half-a-billion dollar shortfall.”

Stewart previously said the city would have to liquidate all assets and exhaust every reserve “just to avoid insolvency.”

Stewart explained that Vancouver had about $130 million in emergency reserves, but the city will lose roughly the same amount for every 10 per cent of property taxes that are not collected.

Bankruptcy was top of mind for Stewart, who shared a deeply personal experience of the bankruptcy his family endured in rural Nova Scotia in the 1970s.

“We lost everything and it blew my family apart,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about these times a lot over the past few weeks. I think about it every time I hear from a resident, about how they’re unable to pay their mortgage. (…) So I won’t make apologies for telling people the truth about how serious this is, and I won’t make apologies for calling on the province and federal governments for help that they can afford.”

Stewart’s press addressed a recent survey on the economic impact of the novel coronavirus on Vancouver’s residents.