Is he going to make more empty threats of bring the Gov’t down?

What a LOAD of shit. He will do nothing before the PR vote. He also knows this is likely the high-water mark for the Greens.

The NDP could sign 5 agreements to build LNG plants and he would do nothing.

He’s a boring windbag.

This is why housing prices are so high…
Having a toilet and shower are simply luxuries..not needed…

“At open houses for the most expensive properties, observed Booth, Cameron, and realtors, up to four out of five potential buyers were speaking Mandarin or Farsi, with some at times each buying two or three houses. Livable homes and decorative trees were being mowed down, replaced by “big, square monstrosities” that often went empty or under-utilized, Cameron said. A recent count revealed 1,700 detached homes in West Vancouver are unoccupied, about one-tenth of the entire stock.”

“We could observe all this happening before our eyes. You’d have to be hiding your head in the sand not to see it. We are a microcosm study of the housing issue at the high end,” said Booth.

For Booth, the battle began in 2014, when an Asian realtor in West Vancouver came to her with three years worth of data she had collected on how the housing market was rapidly skewing in the hillside municipality, where residents routinely elect centre-right provincial and federal politicians. The realtor provided evidence that buyers with non-Anglicized Asian names were dominating the market.”

“To Cameron, however, the affordability predicament — with its attendant problem of wealthy speculators engaging in various tax-avoidance schemes — “is not a right-left issue.” As a card-carrying provincial and federal Liberal party member, he has been disappointed by the B.C. Liberals’ approach to the crisis.”

“Even the fiscally conservative mayor of West Vancouver, Mike Smith, has tried to cool prices for the past two years by asking the former B.C. Liberal government to allow municipalities to charge higher property taxes for non-resident owners. After all, Smith says, as a Canadian, he has to pay higher taxes than Americans on his vacation home in Hawaii.”

Poll-topping Cameron is also free to speak out because is not beholden to powerful outside interests. He has financed his own electoral campaigns, unlike most elected officials throughout Metro Vancouver who have long said yes to large donations from the real-estate industry.

According to Integrity B.C., a watchdog organization, West Vancouver councillors accepted about $4,000 in donations from corporations, all from the property development industry, in 2014.

That’s lower than the $62,000 in real-estate money hauled in by candidates running in the nearby City of North Vancouver, and a pittance compared to the $2.3 million in developers money recently accepted by mayoral and councillor candidates in the City of Vancouver. Cameron applauds how the new B.C. NDP government last fall stopped union, corporate and foreign donations to politicians.”

“Cameron and Booth launched another bold effort. In 2016, they went to the Union of B.C. Municipalities with a resolution that asked the then-B.C. Liberal government to “give local governments the powers under the Community Charter to implement measures to address (foreign capital in the housing market), such as the power to introduce a non-resident property tax rate, as exists in other jurisdictions.” After some rigmarole, the UBCM executive eventually endorsed their resolution in 2017, but its fate remains up in the air.”

“Meanwhile, Cameron and Booth both point to how traffic congestion has become the most recent manifestation of West Vancouver’s housing crisis. Traffic jams have become severe on the North Shore in part because few people who hold jobs in the region can afford to buy or rent homes in it, forcing them to make bridge-crossing commutes every day. Many small businesses are reporting they may have to leave.

“At the rate we’re going,” said Booth, “we’ll soon end up as a resort town — or a ghost town.”

They have moved on, Todd. Get it through your head.

This is the thin silver lining to the entire housing crisis that many RE bears don’t consider. Wealthy foreigners were funneling huge amounts of wealth from mainland China to Vancouver/Toronto. Apart from making housing unaffordable for locals, this actually benefited a lot of Canadians over the short-term. The value of the houses can and will plummet eventually, but the full amount was already paid out to builders, realtors, bankers and homeowners that cashed out. Essentially many Canadians got rich selling foreigners crappy run-down shacks, and the foreigners get to hold the bag when the whole thing implodes on itself.

If they are pretending, they are doing a very good job at that. It is almost 15 years that house prices have started a run that made absolutely unaffordable to all working locals.
I think you are deluding yourself. Reversion to the mean will not occur unless we stop money flows from mainland China.

“There’s no question that money was made as a result of this activity in B.C. casinos,” said Eby at a news conference on Friday.

“It’s important that our economy is based on integrity, and that we don’t have an international reputation as a scofflaw,” meaning a jurisdiction where the rules do not apply to white collar crime, fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering, according to Eby

The attorney general launched the review after reading a report commissioned by the previous Liberal government about the River Rock Casino in Richmond accepting $13.5 million in $20 bills in July 2015, which police said could be proceeds of crime.

The July 2016 report — which was shelved by the previous government — says the majority of the cash is being presented by people commonly referred to as “high roller Asian VIP clients” and that River Rock was known to have accepted single cash buy-ins in excess of $500,000.

In a speech delivered to UBC’s Allard Law School and the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform, Eby said he was astonished once initially briefed on the volume of suspicious cash flowing through B.C. casinos.

“We knew there was something strange going on, but, my God, we had no idea it was this big,” read transcripts of the speech that were published earlier this month.

Eby also pointed to a glaring discrepency between real estate values in Metro Vancouver and the taxable incomes homeowners report to Revenue Canada as cause for concern.

“The question that flows from this economic reality is quite simple. Where is the money coming from?” he said.

Oh, good. Then we can all put the matter to rest.

Douglas Todd is the best opinion maker in Canada. Period.
Each article is a gem. Thanks Mr Todd.

“Richard Wozny has produced 1,200 studies for the public and private sectors on more than $100 billion worth of real estate projects.

But the Vancouver-based commercial property analyst became acutely aware of the harsh indirect consequences of Metro Vancouver’s real-estate investment boom while being treated for non-smoking lung cancer at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver.”

When the nurses, aides and doctors asked what he did for a living, the president of Strategic Site Economics Ltd. would tell them with a smile: “’My job is to make sure everyone makes the most of their real estate. That means ensuring the top one per cent make ever more money.’”

Given his open demeanour, hospital staff would soon start telling Wozny about their own housing difficulties — about not being able to live comfortably in Metro Vancouver, regardless of their income. Even relatively well-paid doctors were struggling.

Inspired by the philosophy courses he studied in university, Wozny wants, in the time he has left on the planet, to give something back to health care providers, who to him in turn symbolize Canada’s valuable middle class.

He has started by producing a groundbreaking report for government officials and the public, titled Low Incomes and High House Prices in Metro Vancouver.

Its main finding is that a “large, mysterious, untaxed pool of international capital” is being converted into speculative investment in residential real estate in Metro Vancouver.

And much of that investment capital, Wozny discovered, is being subsidized by tax avoidance and evasion: It gives housing speculators an unfair advantage over average taxpaying citizens.

“I think the creation of the middle class is one of the greatest achievements of the past century,” Wozny said.

“And taxes are what makes it possible. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”

Despite his difficulties, he still has the energy to do the research to support the position that real estate investment, which he calls “speculative demand,” needs to be controlled by stricter regulations, and increased taxes and fees.

A second-generation Vancouverite, from the Kerrisdale neighbourhood, Wozny says he’s a fiscal conservative who believes the best way to support B.C.’s middle class is by having everybody pay their share of taxes.

Metro Vancouver has become a place of radical inequality, he said. There is no longer any realistic connection between the city’s average wages (which are low by Canadian standards) and real estate prices.

“Housing in this dysfunctional market has become a reflection of unequal rights and obligations. Government intervention is obviously required,” Wozny said in an interview, during which his friendly, energetic demeanour belied his grim medical prognosis and treatment regimen.

The immense volumes of foreign capital finding their surreptitious way into Metro Vancouver’s residential real estate, he said, are largely “unaccounted for, untaxed and unregulated.”

Unlike the stock market, Wozny said, residential real estate “is not meant to be an investment vehicle.”

What does that mean in the context of Metro’s housing affordability crisis?

“It means governments are supposed to protect our freedom to strive for our own personal goals. By allowing real estate prices to escalate to absurd levels, governments are allowing the middle class to be turned into ‘mortgage slaves,’” Wozny said.

“The middle class then becomes nothing more than means to other people’s ends. Their primary utility is reduced to enhancing the wealth of those who already have wealth. Since every capitalist understands that the market cannot solve every problem on its own, we obviously need to rely on regulation to fix market failures like this.”

One step toward fairness, said Wozny, lies in the recommendations of scholars who have been proposing certain property tax reforms, based on precedents from other jurisdictions.

http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-a-smarter-tax-would-ease-vancouvers-housing-crisis

“This is my client work now. I am going to do what I can for them in the time that I have. So I can feel better about going. I’m not doing this as penance. I just feel there is a terrible injustice being done.”

Me? I think it’s Just Marijuana journalism

Looks like you can find it here.
Over 2700 in it now. https://www.facebook.com/groups/vanfalling/

I don’t quite get the title of that group. It’s more of a SJW-type site from what I have seen.

“The problem is not the general public but rather inadequate governance by federal, provincial and municipal politicians who have not updated tax regulations
to be fair or to re ect the modern economy.”

The exchange was indicative of how the B.C. Liberals have approached housing through the campaign: a topic brought up only occasionally, and nearly always framed in the context of having to build more units.