Thank you.
Thank you to both of the witnesses here today. I'm going to start with Mr. Davidoff, but first I want to say that I represent an area in the Okanagan Valley and the Kootenays in British Columbia. Like Niagara, we're on the border. We have many visitors every year. We really have a very large tourism component. We both make good wine. I'll say that to Tony at this time.
Where we differ, at least in my experience, is that we don't have this history of American residents moving into cottages in the Okanagan during the summer. When I was younger, many years ago, there were a lot of Washington residents who would come into the Okanagan for tourism. Most of the homes that are owned now on a seasonal basis in my area are, I would say, owned by people from Calgary or Vancouver. They're not cottages. These are very expensive homes.
I used to live in a little town called Naramata. In recent years, the school population in Naramata has gone from 250 kids to 60 kids, because most of the homes in downtown Naramata are not owned by residents. They are owned by people in Vancouver and Calgary, and they're put out to Airbnb.
With all that, I want to ask Mr. Davidoff about the British Columbia examples of the speculation tax. How has that been implemented? It's implemented in specific urban areas. It's not defined by any census thing. It's defined in a regulation that lists those areas.
Could you talk about that speculation tax? What has it accomplished, and how is it implemented?