Madam Speaker, as a resident of Vancouver Island who cannot afford a home here, we rent and our rent has gone up. I am not going to say for one minute that I am one of the Canadians having a hard time of it. We all know what we make as MPs. However, what happened to the Vancouver housing market started with converting homes into investment properties.
I am not trying to blame everything on the previous Conservative government, so forgive me, but this did start under the Harper government with a $1-million investment fast track for getting residency in Canada. What we have is a lot of offshore money coming in to buy up million-dollar properties and leave them vacant. That began distorting our housing market in a big way, and we have seen rising home values, as we know.
People will say that is all right, because if they own their own home, that is what they cash in for their savings and retirement. A lot of people in my community who own their own home want to downsize and move somewhere else, but if they sell their home, they cannot find a place to live that is affordable in their retirement once they have divested their property. It is a complicated mess that all started when we stopped treating homes as homes and started treating them as investment properties.