Vancouver City Councillor
Firstly, it never should have happened — an absolute abdication of leadership—doomed to failure from the start. We elect leaders to make the tough decisions, not pass the buck; and that is precisely what Christy Clark’s government did by putting our transit infrastructure investments to plebiscite.
We’ve all heard anecdotes about global capital and foreign ownership. I recently wrote about the market externalities affecting my own community of Strathcona. A well-financed west-side investor set about purchasing a number of homes in the neighbourhood: in cash, with no subjects or conditions, and always over the asking price.
Strathcona has a limited land base, maybe 350 detached homes in all, and this particular investor may have purchased a dozen of them—about 5 per cent.
Coincidentally, five per cent is about the same number that the BC Real Estate Association claim as the relatively insignificant amount of foreign ownership in Vancouver. A little higher at 5.8 per cent is the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s figure for percentage of foreign ownership in the downtown peninsula.
Housing affordabilty in Vancouver isn’t really news, of course. Since the federal government stopped funding new social housing in 1993, we’ve seen increasing pressure on low income Vancouverites. Today, after fifteen years of low interest rates and steadily increasing housing prices in Vancouver, what was once a social justice issue for this city’s most vulnerable and their allies, is increasingly taking its toll on middle-income owners — and the politicians and pundits are taking notice.
The affordability crisis in Vancouver certainly isn’t news—it was a central theme of our most recent civic election, and the two preceding it—but in recent weeks, calls for senior government intervention have landed on the premier’s desk in the form of a petition seeking restrictions on foreign ownership of property.
Readers might be confused by Premier Christy Clark’s warning that implementing taxes on foreign real estate investors would cause housing prices to drop, while Housing Minister Rich Coleman insists the provincial government has no intention of even collecting data on foreign ownership, nor has it come up as an issue for his ministry.
VICTORIA B.C. – Pete Fry was confirmed as the B.C. Green Party candidate for an anticipated Vancouver-Mount Pleasant by-election at a nomination meeting held on Saturday April 25, 2015. Fry was a candidate for Vancouver City Council with the Green Party of Vancouver in the 2014 local government elections. He received 46,522 votes, topping polls in Strathcona, Mount Pleasant and Commercial Drive, which are located in the provincial riding of Vancouver-Mount Pleasant.
“I’m really excited and motivated to bring a new voice for our community, and this incredibly diverse and irrepressible riding,” Fry said. “This by-election is a real opportunity for East Vancouverites to vote for something that they believe in, rather than vote against something they do not. I look forward to sharing our Green Party vision of progressive values, climate leadership, and community advocacy.