Thank you, Representative Higgins, for being with us today.
I'll just continue with that line of questioning because I represent a district, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, in southern British Columbia along the border. It's very similar in many ways to Niagara except there's no big urban centre directly across the border. We're probably four or five hours away from Seattle.
We have relatively small amounts of cross-border traffic coming from Washington for tourism. I think there was more 50 years ago in proportionate terms, but right now, I think we get more Australians visiting the Okanagan area than we get Americans coming as tourists. Certainly, I have never heard of an American actually owning a holiday home in my riding except for one founder of a big tech company based in Seattle who I will not name and who has a wonderful home in my riding. However, it's certainly not a cottage.
I guess my question on all this is this: How widespread...? It sounds like this is sort of a “north shore of Lake Erie” situation. Monsieur Savard-Tremblay just asked you how many of your colleagues have experienced this or faced this. We have a vacancy tax in British Columbia, and it's set in certain areas. We take areas that have real problems with housing costs and housing availability, and we put boundaries around those, so certain municipalities face this tax and others do not. I'm just wondering if that kind of carve-out.... It's not just urban-rural. It's certain areas.
I'm just wondering if that kind of approach might fix this if we find that it is really concentrated in your area. You seem to be at the pointed end of the stick in this.