Douglas Todd: Why we need to stop subsidizing foreign ownership of Metro housing
It took me a while to twig to how middle-class workers are subsidizing many of the wealthy owners that they are competing against to buy a home in urban B.C.’s stratospherically expensive housing market.
It turned out Lo was dead on. The short version of what became of my reporting on this housing and tax avoidance saga, which led some developer-friendly social commentators to accuse me of xenophobia, is that things finally changed a few years ago — after the affordability crisis grew even more drastic.
Related To understand the housing disadvantage that tax avoidance puts on local wage earners, the definition of foreign ownership needs first to be clarified. That competitive pressure is compounded when satellite families — especially the estimated 200,000 spouses, children and relatives that UBC geographer David Ley says have arrived in Metro Vancouver through investor immigrant programs — don’t pay much, or any, tax in Canada.
“If you earn your income abroad and spend most of your time out of the country, you can file with the Canadian Revenue Agency as a non-tax resident in certain cases, even if your family resides here. … In the meantime your family enjoys the public amenities and social services year-round. This is the so-called ‘satellite family’ situation.”
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