Editor:
Jim White urges Nicholas Simons to back off of any suggestion of extending the foreign buyers tax to the Sunshine Coast (Letters, March 9).
This makes good sense. When a person retires at 65, they are likely to live another 20+ years. Shouldn’t the fact that they once purchased a house mean that they get a financially worry-free retirement? That was the social contract, wasn’t it?
Sadly, retirees can no longer rely on being financed by younger Canadians – youngsters are too busy living in the basement, obtaining university degrees of dubious value (albeit with safe-space access), staring at smartphones and eating avocado toast. And apparently retirees just never got around to saving enough to live to 85. Thus the obvious solution – encourage foreigners to pay ever higher prices for retirees’ houses. If the youngsters ever need a house, well they can always buy one later at the inflated price, perhaps before they themselves retire (assuming “retirement” even exists in 30 years).
Fortunately, Canada’s ongoing international trade deficit comes at a perfect time to fund foreigners’ efforts to buy up our real-estate (and factories and old aged homes), since we don’t have much else to export – besides oil of course, which isn’t worth what it once was (and few outside of Alberta wants to pump it up, and even fewer want to allow for ocean access).
And, for goodness sake, why direct a portion of foreign purchase money into government general revenues for everyone’s benefit, when it can just go straight into the pockets of a handful of deserving retirees? At least, let’s agree to not ask questions about the source; isolated purchases with laundered dirty fentanyl money is someone else’s problem, and anyhow there is no housing shortage here.
“Just like the NDP,” Jim? Sounds more like “entitlement.”
Alan Donenfeld, Gibsons
