How About Slashing Red Tape for More Affordable Housing?

Another year, another flipping housing tax. The BC NDP government recently trotted out theirs, following a federal one unveiled in January 2023. Yet, only 2.8 per cent of properties were potentially “flipped” within one year, according to Stats Can data.

Should home sales or rental contracts transparently list all the government fees and taxes in the price or rents?

All levels of government seem to be competing in an Amazing Race to see how many new housing taxes and regulations they can create rather than fixing the growing problem — a home shortage caused by increasingly complicated approval processes, ever-changing regulatory red tape, high interest rates, plus rising construction costs, taxes and fees amidst uncontrolled immigration over many years. Will Federal Home Equity Taxes Come Next?

On top of all the flipping, vacancy, speculation, property transfer taxes, GST and additional school taxes, the news just leaked the federal government is also secretly polling Canadians’ sentiments on a “home equity” tax (a new annual wealth tax of thousands of dollars on your home’s value) despite public promises not to target principal residences.  Given the unsustainable growth rate of 13 per cent of Canadians employed in public sector jobs between 2019 and 2023 — 3.6 times more than private-sector employment growth — and “obscene” severances of hundreds of thousands of dollars for short-term political appointments, as CHEK News reporter Rob Shaw noted, massive tax hikes are expected. The National Post just reported the latest Statistics Canada data that one in four people work for some level of government in Canada while the private sector that funds these jobs has stagnated. That’s not sustainable.

Government imposed red tapes adds to housing costs or makes them financially unviable to build!

Must Canada wait for a catastrophic urban wildfire like Los Angeles before our politicians do more than promise to address the bureaucratic log jams?  After at least two dozen deaths and approximately 12,000 homes/structures destroyed in that 2025 fire, California Gov. Gavin Newsom committed in his executive order to “allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes.” But even this crisis-driven pronouncement should elicit a healthy degree of skepticism. He’s presided over California’s chronic housing affordability issues with massive declines in more affordable multi-family homebuilding. From January 2023 until now, the number of multi-family permits/units built declined by 33.6 per cent in his home state. These political promises are reminiscent of the typical New Year’s resolution to shed 50 pounds with no plan to address change in diet or exercise.

These political promises are reminiscent of the typical New Year’s resolution to shed 50 pounds with no plan to address change in diet or exercise.

Federally, provincially, regionally and locally, our Canadian governments have poured fuel on the fire by increasing immigration beyond our capacity to provide enough homes, health care, jobs and schools.

They then piled on new regulations that add costs to builders, including 20-per-cent social housing requirements they call “inclusionary zoning”. This means other buyers and renters subsidize the lower-income groups. Burnaby was forced to walk back from this policy.In a bid to help, the B.C. government’s experimental offer of pre-approved cookie-cutter homebuilding designs was a quaint, recycled idea that might have worked for small-scale housing. That was quickly sabotaged by all the new regional Metro Vancouver government fees that increased townhome or duplex project costs by millions of dollars. Imagine giving the Titanic captain a new blueprint for a stronger hull as the ship was sinking.

Rather than peeling back red tape for builders, they’ve kept many cost-increasing policies such as natural-gas bans for new homes. Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim admitted homebuilders told him that eliminating the ban would save $80,000 in construction costs per duplex. Yet council voted to retain the ban while B.C. is importing 25 per cent of its electricity from the U.S. and Alberta, both expensive and often generated by burning  fossil fuels, including coal. However, kudos to Vancouver for agreeing to reduce some of the view cones that capped building heights. This will allow more homes to built, perhaps even some rent-to-own options.How about another simple, regulatory improvement idea? Cities could just accept plans from builders’ qualified professionals (architects, engineers) without needing a second review by a bureaucrat. Would you hire two plumbers at once to fix your leaky pipe?

Would you hire two plumbers at once to fix your leaky pipe?

SFU Professor Dr. Andrey Pavlov finds that despite government promises, Metro Vancouver is completing fewer homes than in 2017.

So here we are again where Metro Vancouver is home to the highest rents and housing prices in Canada. We’re actually completing fewer homes now than in 2017, according to Dr. Andrey Pavlov, SFU professor of real estate finance. 

Housing isn’t the only area British Columbians are feeling squeezed. Groceries, inflation, heating costs and more have left nearly half (46 per cent) of our residents now $200 or less away from insolvency, finds MNP’s latest debt index report. Almost 25 per cent of food-bank visits in B.C. were by working people, which doubled in the last five years, the Vancouver Sun noted.

No wonder the Metro Vancouver social-housing wait list is now at 18,865 households, an increase of 4,008 households from the previous year, according to the Metro Vancouver Housing Data Book 2023.

Housing starts are down in Vancouver and Victoria after governments successfully demonized “investors” in condo markets with all the new housing taxes plus fee hikes. So investors retreated from presale purchases, which once helped builders qualify for construction loans from banks and lenders. About 30 per cent of existing rentals are those investor-owned condos (called the secondary rental market) in Metro Vancouver, based on that same Housing Data Book. Consequently, vacancy rates hover at around one per cent and renters stay put because they have nowhere to go, stated a Vancouver staff update.

Investors help fund the rental market providing more choices that increase vacancy rates.

Continuing to tax homes like they’re cigarettes or health hazards means we’ll get less of them. One home builder, who waited years for building permits, got hit with a punishing $1.3 million “vacancy tax” for not renting out old uninhabitable homes with asbestos, mould and rat feces.

Stop taxing homes like cigarettes!

Punitive taxation scares away housing investors we need, to friendlier building environments, like some U.S. states or Alberta.

Meanwhile, property tax exemptions built thousands of homes in Kelowna, increasing vacancies and lowering rents. 

For this new year 2026, why not focus on incentives?

Former Saturday Night Live star David Spade is offering a $5000 cash reward to catch arsonists starting fires in Los Angeles. Maybe we need a cash reward or reality show featuring the municipality that can best unclog its permitting processes, reduce fees/taxes that eat up a third of the homebuilding cost and get housing approvals down to months rather than years. Who’s in?