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Originally Posted by supafamous
These taxes basically treat homes as investments and if it's your primary home then it's hugely unfair to do it. Homes are NOT investments, they only became treated as such because of a lack of housing. Fix the housing, not the tax policy on them!
I've heard suggestions about taxing the gains like they're capital gains (50% of the gain would be taxable) which would be a huge penalty against people who are moving for legit reasons (for work or growing families).
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Thank you, sir~! You took the words straight out of my mouth.
It is ironic that the Generation Squeeze UBC prof dude even said it himself in his surtax policy proposal that people are parking their wealth in real estates, thus driving up prices. Well, hello there, idiot! When the property is somebody's primary residence, how are they "parking their wealth" in it??? With investment properties, yes, you can say people are "parking their wealth" in that, but not primary residence.
It also comes back to the question of how an RE ownership surtax would be effective in lowering home prices. Is the (federal?) gov going to use this tax to subsidize first time home buyers? Remember they tried this already, and all it did was inflate the cost of those entry market units? The core of the problem for the Vancouver / Toronto markets is huge disconnect in supply and demand. Until you fix that, the affordability problem isn't gonna go away. Forcing existing home owners from the working / middle class to cough up more money is not going to do anything.
The Liberals government continues to deny that they plan on taxing capital gains on primary residences, but when the federal gov funds a study on this policy, I will not at all believe them on their words. If / When they deem that the policy will have a chance of not seeing too much opposition, they are definitely going to try and sneak it in.