The thing is, and this is a taste for all you Albertan's who aren't familiar with the BC political environment, this is all traceable to corruption.
This is from an article from last year:
Quote:
Indeed, it would be hard to name any other country in the world that doesn’t keep detailed data on non-resident ownership. (If readers know of any countries that don’t do so, please let me know.) For what it’s worth, I’ve been urging politicians since February, 2013, to collect data on foreign ownership.
In contrast to laissez-faire Canada, some countries basically don’t allow any foreign ownership at all, except in the most restricted conditions, such as China, Thailand and Switzerland.
Switzerland is one of the countries that allows virtually no foreign ownership of real estate. Thailand and China are also extremely restrictive.
Switzerland won’t allow virtually any foreign ownership of real estate. Thailand and China are similar. Most other countries have restrictions, but they’re less extreme. Canada and B.C., for reasons we can only guess at, don’t even track foreign ownership.
In addition, the majority of the world’s federal governments, unlike Ottawa, have various restrictions on foreign ownership. Those countries include Australia, Denmark, Mexico, Singapore, Hong Kong and a host of nations.
Unlike many Canadian politicians and extraverted real estate developers, the leaders of these countries don’t think it’s “xenophobic” to safeguard national sovereignty. The U.S. is among the nations that institute various kinds of (often-complex) tax restrictions on foreigners buying housing.
Even several Canadian provinces don’t allow all foreign purchases. Manitoba, Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan restrict the sale of farmland to non-residents.
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Not only are there a variety of means and methods to have corrected this bubble before it threatened to burst the Canadian economy, these variety of means and methods should have been instituted years, decades, ago.
BUT, the province is so corrupted that it's never gotten any serious political traction even though the vast majority of the province is for it.