Opinion: B.C. court ruling should end political fears in Ottawa about acting on foreign ownership
Douglas Todd: Hidden foreign ownership helps explain Metro Vancouver's 'decoupling' of house prices/incomes
Whatever federal politicians end up promising, it’s not as if curbing foreign ownership would end the housing affordability crisis in Canada’s major cities. As Yan says, housing prices are shaped by not only foreign and domestic demand, but by the supply of dwellings and by changing financing options, including mortgage interest rates.
They include curbing “property speculation” by both foreign and domestic investors, stopping the rapid “flipping” of homes for a quick profit and increasing food security by protecting farmland, which is vulnerable to foreign ownership and to being misused for mansions and non-agricultural purposes.Article content
The Canada Revenue Agency could do much more, Yan said, to take part in the kind of inter-bureaucracy information sharing that is supporting B.C.’s speculation tax, which monitors owners not paying their share of Canadian income taxes. “With big data now, there are few excuses for not looking into these loopholes.”
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