But NAFTA and tariff said otherwise. Bhahahaha!

And apparently it is June 1st.

“British Columbia, he says, has been particularly active in its trade tours to Hong Kong and China’s Mainland cities, “to prime the pump of economic relations.” The province has become dependent on the fees generated by the Business Immigrant Program (BIP) and real estate tax revenues. He cites the NDP opposition to the federal government’s effort to get tough with tax evasion in the 1990s, with tougher enforcement of the BIP. The development community also reacted.

“It seemed that more important than accurate reporting of global income was the imperative to keep the money flowing into BC,” he writes.”

And here is Andy Yan:

“He critiqued Dr. Yu’s and Dr. Lauster’s reports for disregarding the vast documentation and media reports on the globalization of residential real estate.

“Governments around the world have implemented policies including taxes to limit the role of foreign nationals in [the] local residential real estate market,” he writes. “These reports also fail to acknowledge the agency of Chinese Canadians and other visible minorities as political and social actors who have actively and publicly advocated for policies to deal with foreign ownership and capital in Vancouver.”

And here is Justin Fung:

“Mr. Fung is a Vancouver-born Chinese Canadian who works in the tech industry. He helped launch the non-profit group, Housing Action for Local Taxpayers (HALT), which takes the position that the affordability crisis is due largely to offshore wealth buying into the region’s housing market. It’s wealth that has been “facilitated by a powerful property development and real estate lobby that have too long influenced government policy and have profited significantly off this foreign investment and housing affordability crisis,” Mr. Fung writes in his affidavit, on behalf of the crown.”

Justing Fung is making sense:

“One of the reasons why I personally became involved in HALT and started speaking out was because I saw that others who were publicly citing the role of foreign buyers in price escalation – in particular, the role of wealthy Chinese foreign buyers – were attracting accusations of racism… I considered that I was in a position to contribute usefully to the public discourse, without the fear that others might have of being labelled racist,” he says.
He says that public concern about Chinese wealth flowing into Metro Vancouver is not about race. Instead, he argues, “the concern is fundamentally about class and wealth inequality…”

Doug Ford becoming premier has no effect on real estate. No politician has an effect on real estate. No China man has an effect on real estate. No local has an effect on real estate.

The values of the world’s assets are controlled by a few men who meet in Basel Switzerland every six weeks; The Monarchs of Money.

They decide the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T_VxdLJdDU

Developers, land holders, FIRE

Aided by hardworking homeowners. Lol

Wow! Just about every word in that article would have been pure heresy just a few years ago.

PS: Isn’t it time for this blog to be updated? We are still on last Friday’s Friday Free For All.

For SIDA:

“All levels of government have courted foreign money and actively encouraged it for decades, and we are seeing the consequences of that policy in Vancouver’s unaffordable housing market today.”

Is Ley a rabid racist as well?

David Ley:

“Dr. Ley doesn’t mince words in his expert opinion. He draws a direct line between the development industry and past governments that courted foreign investment. Government enthusiastically invited foreign capital, he says, and today, we see the consequences.

He explains that B.C. governments, facing a declining resource-based economy, have sought out East Asian investment since the 1980s. Starting with the sale of the Expo 86 site in 1988, the province made it abundantly clear that it was open to doing business with Asia, particularly in residential-property development, says Dr. Ley. “

And this. Could not put it more clearly myself:

“In regard to Dr. Lauster and Dr. Yu, who argue that the foreign-buyer transfer tax is part of a legacy of racism in Vancouver, Dr. Ley concurs with the historic part of their account. However, he says, “in Vancouver’s challenging housing market, Chinese Canadians are equally subject to acute affordability pressures and are among the leaders in urging solutions. Unlike the colonial period, there is no ethno-racial divide that neatly separates, homogenizes, and penalizes populations of East Asian origin.”

“They came to spend money. Why deny their visas?””

The assumption here is that, as long as they come to spend money, we should be admitting and welcoming anyone. No questions asked.

Do you all see why this is crazy, or I need to spell it out for you?

Interesting. It says one of the discussion topics of the conference was the “One belt, one road” initiative. There is some weird stuff going on around the world related to China’s efforts to secure resources for this project. Apparently governments are starting to take notice and there are related prosecutions in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that has something to do with these visas being denied.

Check out the Planet Money podcast episode #837: The Belt, The Road And The Money. Only 20 minutes long and super interesting. ttps://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money

3,000,000 ten year holders at last count. Projected to rise to 12 million in 5 years.

That’s 33% of the entire Canadian population.

Wow. Complete colonization.

It’s not automatically renewed, and I believe the maximum length of a single trip on such a visa is 2 years – not 6 months. Do you know anything at all about your favourite topic?

ICBC fire sale?

https://globalnews.ca/video/4261042/icbc-fire-sale

“An analysis by Kershaw found that in 1976 — around the time the baby-boom generation was coming of age — the price of an average Canadian home (figures adjusted for inflation) was $213,030 and the median full-time earnings for a 25-to-34-year old were $54,700. That’s a ratio of roughly four to one.

Compare that to 2017, when the average home price was $510,179 and income for the same age group was $49,800, pushing the ratio to 10 to one.”

“In Ontario, the ratio for 2017 rises to 12 to one, he adds. And in Vancouver, where home prices have taken the steepest climbs, the figure shoots to 14 to one. “Across the country today, the typical home price is up by hundreds of thousands of dollars while young people’s earnings on an annual basis have gone down by about $5,000,” Kershaw said. Paying for the house once you are in it, hasn’t got any easier either. Back in 1976, it took five months of full-time work to pay the annual mortgage on an average-priced Canadian home, after saving 20 per cent as a down payment, Kershaw said. In 2017, it took six months nationally (6.5 months in Ontario and eight months in B.C.). “Even if housing prices aren’t rising as fast this year as the last, the damage has… Read more »

But the millenials are digging their own grave. Need to vote for a populist national party.

They busy believing the msm. Their loss.

Not “could”. they are already doing it. This morning on CBC radio they had a tech worker who filed a freedom of information requests to disclose the agreement between Airbnb and the city of Vancouver. It turns out there is no obligation for Airbnb to remove listings that are in contravention to city bylaws. Instead, all enforcement will have to be shouldered by the city. The tech worker questioned the motives of the city for this: apparently enforcement is willingly slack and it would be cheap to make it harsher by requiring an automatic code verification snippet on the website. Yet, the city of Vancouver has no plans to request this cheap and powerful fix on the Airbnb posting page. In other words, the city wants to use soft power to dissuade, rather than actually pursue and fine. This is… Read more »

“In his affidavit, David Ley, author of Millionaire Migrants, says a key tactic of pro-growth real-estate advocates has been to claim that opponents of rapid expansion are xenophobic.

Developers first began playing the racism card in Vancouver and Los Angeles in the 1990s, Ley says. He notes Bob Rennie, a famed condo marketer and former chief of fundraising for the B.C. Liberal party, has alleged racism is “a huge undercurrent” in the housing debate.

Ley accepts Lauster and Yu’s analyses of B.C.’s discriminatory history up to the repeal of the immigration act in 1947. But he laments neither acknowledge how attitudes have changed. “Unlike in the colonial period, there is no ethno-racial divide that neatly separates, homogenizes and penalizes people of East Asian origin,” Ley says.”

““There is significant resistance within Vancouver’s Chinese‐Canadian community to inflationary pressures in the property market primed by foreign capital, dispelling innuendoes that such resistance is inherited from old racist attitudes held by white Canadians.”” “‘An Angus Reid poll found 89 per cent of the city’s ethnic Chinese support the foreign-buyers tax. Even the then-Chinese consul general in Vancouver, Liu Fei, said, “The Chinese government would have no hesitation in stepping in and regulating (house) price increases like this, unlike governments here.” Indeed, China has a range of restrictions on foreign buyers. And Yan’s affidavit makes it clear that jurisdictions throughout the world limit the purchasing power of foreign nationals. Yan says Yu and Lauster should not have ignored curbs on foreign buyers in Prince Edward Island, Ontario, Manitoba, Singapore, Hong Kong, Britain, Australia and the U.S. He could have added… Read more »

Douglas Todd is in great shape again. Here is one key question he asks:

“Li’s lawyer did not reply to questions about who has so far been paying for the lawsuit’s substantial costs.”