Thank you.
Mr. Marsland, back in July, CMHC awarded a $250,000 grant to UBC's School of Population and Public Health, which appears to be studying the idea of a home equity tax. This money was provided to a project called “Generation Squeeze”, and it has complained:
Many Canadians bank on profits from home ownership to secure their financial future and gain wealth. We need to make it so that no Canadian relies on gains in housing wealth to feel secure, and we need to rethink policies that, by encouraging financialization of housing, push the costs to buy or rent a home even further out of reach.
The UBC grant choice is noteworthy, since in 2019 UBC researchers called homeowners lottery winners with an unfair tax advantage.
Audrey-Anne Coulombe, a CMHC spokeswoman, was quoted as saying, “The objective is to identify solutions that can level the playing field between renters and owners.”
Unfortunately, these sorts of statements do not acknowledge that homeowners pay a huge portion of their income in taxes to three levels of government before they can even save for a down payment. There's no acknowledgement of the cost of owning a home, like maintenance, repairs and insurance, let alone any renovations that enhance the value of the property. We also know that government itself adds hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a new home by way of zoning regulations, development charges and housing limits. The C.D. Howe Institute did a study here in Vancouver in 2018 and said it constitutes a total additional $644,000 added cost to a single detached home.
Why on earth would the government even consider the idea of implementing a capital gains tax on the homes of Canadians? Can you assure Canadians that there will not be a home equity tax implemented in order to pay for COVID-19 spending?