[URBAN NOTE] "Wake up, Toronto, to your housing crisis"
Gary Mason wrote Thursday from Victoria for The Globe and Mail about the Toronto real estate crisis, contrasting the belated responses of Toronto and Ontario unfavourably to those of his province of residence.
Of all the political U-turns B.C. Premier Christy Clark has undertaken in power, perhaps none was as jarring and unexpected as the one she performed on housing.
For most of 2015, and at least half of the following year, the Premier refused to do anything about rapidly escalating house prices in Metro Vancouver. She maintained that bringing in measures to cool the market might hurt the equity in people’s homes. She denied foreign investors had much to do with the fierce escalation in costs, relying on the faulty, self-serving data from a real-estate industry that wanted the sticker-shock insanity to continue.
And there was also the not-insignificant fact that the B.C. treasury was getting fattened on the provincial tax that exists on home sales - easy money that can become like crack to a government.
But then Ms. Clark and her cabinet came to an uncomfortable realization: The growing public outrage over the fact that the middle-class dreams of owning a home were evaporating by the day for many and might cost the government re-election. So the Premier did what she vowed she wouldn’t and brought in a 15-per-cent foreign buyer’s tax that did precisely what it was intended to - put the brakes on the absurd, and immoral, goings-on in the real estate industry.
Unfortunately, by the time she did, it was too late for thousands.
Of all the political U-turns B.C. Premier Christy Clark has undertaken in power, perhaps none was as jarring and unexpected as the one she performed on housing.
For most of 2015, and at least half of the following year, the Premier refused to do anything about rapidly escalating house prices in Metro Vancouver. She maintained that bringing in measures to cool the market might hurt the equity in people’s homes. She denied foreign investors had much to do with the fierce escalation in costs, relying on the faulty, self-serving data from a real-estate industry that wanted the sticker-shock insanity to continue.
And there was also the not-insignificant fact that the B.C. treasury was getting fattened on the provincial tax that exists on home sales - easy money that can become like crack to a government.
But then Ms. Clark and her cabinet came to an uncomfortable realization: The growing public outrage over the fact that the middle-class dreams of owning a home were evaporating by the day for many and might cost the government re-election. So the Premier did what she vowed she wouldn’t and brought in a 15-per-cent foreign buyer’s tax that did precisely what it was intended to - put the brakes on the absurd, and immoral, goings-on in the real estate industry.
Unfortunately, by the time she did, it was too late for thousands.