The municipal tax for 9-1-1 service is a monthly payment of 0.46$ since August 1st, 2016, that must be paid by every customer of a given telephone service, regardless of the physical mode (landline or wireless, including internet phone service and prepaid card services), if that service allows users to call, directly or indirectly, an emergency 9-1-1 centre. This tax was previoulsy of 40 ¢ since December 2009.
This tax replaces the former municipal 9-1-1 user fee of 47 ¢, which has been in effect since 1995. However, the former 0.47$ fee was not collected by all telephone service providers but only by those which had signed agreements with the various municipalities. Most wireless telephone service providers had not signed such agreements, so that only some of the customers of a given phone service (roughly 4.4 million out of a total of 8 million) were contributing toward the financing of the emergency 9-1-1 call centres. This raised a problem of fairness. It also caused a problem of underifnancing for the emergency 9-1-1 call centres, particularly in contexts where some people replaced their landline phones with other telephony modes.
Similar conditions exist in seven other Canadian provinces.