Thank you, Chair, and thank you all for being here.
I'd like to direct my questions to Mayor Redekop as well. The only connection I have to Fort Erie, I have to say, is that my father used to live there in the 1930s, working for Fleet Aircraft. Then after the Second World War, he went back to the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, where he was born and raised, and, of course, that's why I ended up being born and raised there and not in Fort Erie.
In British Columbia in 2018, the government brought in the speculation and vacancy tax, which is very similar in some ways to this tax—at least, it has the same aims and in many ways the same mechanisms. However, it works on a much more regional basis and carves in most of the big metropolitan centres, where the housing price crisis is greatest. It leaves out a lot of the more rural areas—most of British Columbia in fact, including the south Okanagan, where I am—but it includes the central Okanagan. It takes that much more regional approach, in which there are boundaries, but I would say they're much bigger than the boundaries I've seen with regard to this, so there's less in and out.
I'm just wondering if you might comment. You talked about the exception with respect to how long someone has been a resident there, but do you think it would be possible for the government to bring in something like that on this tax? I know with federal taxes it's a little different, but would it help the situation if the federal government were to say, “Look, this is really a problem more in places like the greater Toronto area?”