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Housing

Poilievre will cut sales tax on new homes under $1 Million saving tens of thousands

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From a Conservative Party of Canada news release

In a video released Monday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has announced a plan to lower the cost of a new home’s worth under $1 million dollars.

Poilievre says a conservative government will axe the sales tax on new homes sold for less than $1 million.

That would cut the cost of an $800,000 home by $40,000 or a $500,000 home by $25,000.

Accordingly Poilievre says this will lead to the building of an extra 30,000 new homes every year.

The news could get even better as the PM hopeful says he’ll push provinces to drop their sales tax as well.

Poilievre plans to use money set aside in the Liberal’s Housing Accelerator Fund which he says has been ineffective.

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David Clinton

The Hidden and Tragic Costs of Housing and Immigration Policies

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The Audit

 

 David Clinton

We’ve discussed the housing crisis before. That would include the destabilizing combination of housing availability – in particular a weak supply of new construction – and the immigration-driven population growth.

Parsing all the data can be fun, but we shouldn’t forget the human costs of the crisis. There’s the significant financial strain caused by rising ownership and rental costs, the stress so many experience when desperately searching for somewhere decent to live, and the pressure on businesses struggling to pay workers enough to survive in madly expensive cities.

If Canada doesn’t have the resources to house Canadians, should there be fewer of us?

Well we’ve also discussed the real problems caused by low fertility rates. As they’ve already discovered in low-immigration countries like Japan and South Korea, there’s the issue of who will care for the growing numbers of childless elderly. And who – as working-age populations sharply decline – will sign up for the jobs that are necessary to keep things running.

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The odds are that we’re only a decade or so behind Japan. Remember how a population’s replacement-level fertility rate is around 2.1 percent? Here’s how Canadian “fertility rates per female” have dropped since 1991:

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Put differently, Canada’s crude birth rate per 1,000 population dropped from 14.4 in 1991, to 8.8 in 2023.

As a nation, we face very difficult constraints.

But there’s another cost to our problems that’s both powerful and personal, and it exists at a place that overlaps both crises. A recent analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) frames it in terms of suppressed household formation.

Household formation happens when two more more people choose to share a home. As I’ve written previously, there are enormous economic benefits to such arrangements, and the more permanent and stable the better. There’s also plenty of evidence that children raised within stable families have statistically improved economic, educational, and social outcomes.

But if households can’t form, there won’t be a lot of children.

In fact, the PBO projects that population and housing availability numbers point to the suppression of nearly a half a million households in 2030. And that’s incorporating the government’s optimistic assumptions about their new Immigration Levels Plan (ILP) to reduce targets for both permanent and  temporary residents. It also assumes that all 2.8 million non-permanent residents will leave the country when their visas expire. Things will be much worse if either of those assumptions doesn’t work out according to plan.

Think about a half a million suppressed households. That number represents the dreams and life’s goals of at least a million people. Hundreds of thousands of 30-somethings still living in their parents basements. Hundreds of thousands of stable, successful, and socially integrated families that will never exist.

And all that will be largely (although not exclusively) the result of dumb-as-dirt political decisions.

Who says policy doesn’t matter?

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Crime

Luxury Vancouver Homes at the Center of $100M CAD Loan and Chinese Murder Saga

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In a case intertwining toxic loans, a brutal murder, and a court-ordered execution in China, amid the transnational flow of millions into Vancouver’s luxury real estate market, two families are locked in a legal battle over at least five high-end homes in areas of the city reshaped by decades of murky capital flight funneled through underground transfers into Canada’s West Coast.

The plaintiffs’ case, which initially focused on at least eight properties—now reduced to five—alleges that “many millions” worth of real estate was purchased with proceeds from unpaid loans in China and fraudulent transfers into Vancouver real estate.

On November 21, the Supreme Court of British Columbia delivered a procedural ruling allowing the six-year-long Canadian court battle, which includes sordid details such as the slaying of the lender family patriarch in China by the borrower, the now-deceased Long Ni, to continue.

Mr. Ni had promised the lender and his family high returns—up to 50 percent per annum—for providing him funds to invest in Chinese coal mines, the filings say.

Before his death, Changbin Yang, a 54-year-old businessman, had extended two series of loans to Mr. Ni, neither of which had been repaid. The first series, predating 2014, totaled approximately $100 million CAD, including interest. The second involved two loans in April 2017 of about $6 million CAD.

A key detail emerged from a Chinese court ruling in Hubei province. It said Mr. Yang’s claim for massive debt repayments stemmed from a series of promissory notes, culminating in a master promissory note “issued by Mr. Ni to Mr. Yang dated April 8, 2017, three months before Mr. Yang was murdered.”

On July 25, 2017, Mr. Yang was murdered in China at Mr. Ni’s behest. Following the murder, Mr. Ni was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to death by the Chinese courts. After exhausting all appeals, he was executed in 2020.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are five relatives of Mr. Yang, including his wife, Ms. Liu, and various other family members. Most are permanent residents of Canada living in China. They allege that the murderer’s family are “sitting on property in Vancouver worth many millions of dollars,” the November 2024 B.C. Supreme Court ruling says.

The plaintiffs are seeking judgment against all three defendants—Mr. Ni (now deceased), his wife, Ms. Chen, and his daughter, Ms. Ni—for debt, conversion, and unjust enrichment amounting to approximately $113.5 million CAD.

But Mr. Ni’s family, now living in Vancouver, denies financial ties to the executed borrower and asserts that the court battle is preventing them from selling some of their Canadian properties.

“Ms. Chen and Ms. Ni filed a joint response to the civil claim,” the procedural ruling states, in which “they deny any involvement in, or even knowledge of, the financial transactions between Mr. Yang and Mr. Ni. They plead the allegations of wrongdoing against them ‘are fabrications from start to finish.'”

Filings in the case detail the circumstances under which the murderer’s family settled in Vancouver, apparently four years after Mr. Ni started drawing on loans from his subsequent victim.

In her affidavit dated September 13, 2024, the murderer’s wife described how the family moved to Vancouver in 2011 after she obtained permanent resident status the previous year. She and her husband purchased their matrimonial home on West 33rd Avenue in December 2010 and moved in by March 2011. While Mr. Ni continued working in China, he visited his family in Canada several times a year.

Ms. Chen described their marriage as “a typical relationship in that part of China,” stating that she was a stay-at-home mother while her husband was the family’s breadwinner. She claimed to be aware only in a general sense of what her husband did for a living and, in accordance with her culture, would not “pry into his business affairs.” Ms. Chen also detailed purchasing two rental properties in 2011—on Granville Street and West King Edward Avenue—using money that her husband earned.

The murderer, Mr. Ni, was alive when the lawsuit was initiated and filed a “bare-bones” Response to Civil Claim in December 2018. Following his execution, his counsel withdrew, leaving Ms. Chen and Ms. Ni to face the allegations alone.

Initially, the plaintiffs’ claim targeted “at least” eight properties in Vancouver and Burnaby. They specifically alleged that each of these properties had been purchased by Mr. Ni with the loan proceeds from Mr. Yang and registered, either at the time of purchase or later, in the name of his wife or daughter. However, as the case progressed, doubts arose regarding the true ownership of three properties. The plaintiffs amended their claim to focus on five properties, refining their allegations.

The lawsuit now centers on five properties located across Vancouver’s most exclusive neighborhoods, including Shaughnessy, Kitsilano, Kerrisdale, and West Point Grey—areas renowned for their affluence and skyrocketing home prices.

Notably, West Point Grey is the riding of B.C. Premier David Eby and the neighborhood where Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once taught at a private school before entering Liberal Party politics. The plaintiffs allege they have traced funds from Mr. Ni’s business activities and alleged crimes in China to these properties.

Commenting on his sympathy toward the plaintiffs—despite long procedural delays in their case—in November 2024, Supreme Court Justice Kent wrote, “The plaintiffs are victims of a horrific crime committed by Mr. Ni.”

Addressing the defendants’ claims of ignorance regarding the murderer’s business activities in Chinese mining, he added, “Although Ms. Chen and Ms. Ni testify in their affidavits that they had no knowledge of Mr. Ni’s business affairs, they do not deny that the money used to purchase the properties registered in their name was supplied by Mr. Ni from his business activities in China.”

Travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic added another layer of complexity. Ms. Liu pointed out that Mr. Ni’s incarceration in China meant he was unable to testify in the British Columbia proceedings, although his testimony was available for the Chinese litigation. She also noted that in 2022, with China’s borders closed, the plaintiffs were uncertain whether they could travel to Canada for the trial.

According to Ms. Liu, the plaintiffs had information suggesting that Mr. Ni had used the loaned funds to invest in coal mines in China. They hoped to enforce the Chinese judgment against these assets before pursuing real estate recovery in Canada.

This case, far from finished, is representative of numerous similar legal battles over Vancouver property, characterized by complex transnational loan arrangements, frequently linked to underground banking and opaque business dealings in China. It underscores the challenges of Canadian courts in mediating massive property dealings involving allegations of transnational financial fraud, sometimes intertwined with violent crime and debt enforcement battles.

As Canada grapples with a housing affordability crisis—issues The Bureau’s investigations suggest are partly linked to international underground banking networks involving China and Middle Eastern states—this case seems emblematic of systemic challenges extending far beyond the dispute between the families of the murdered lender Mr. Yang and the executed borrower Mr. Ni.

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