Residents petition against speculation tax
The signature target for an online petition aimed at stopping B.C.'s new speculation tax keeps increasing automatically.
As of Sunday afternoon, more than 6,500 people had put their names to the petition, launched last week.
"There's been a good response so far," Collin Sawatzky, a Kelowna man who's helping promote the petition, said Sunday.
"I think that shows how many people are really worried about what this tax is going to do to real estate and the economy," said Sawatzky, who fears a market downturn will lower the offers he'll get for a property he currently has for sale.
Petition organizers had no particular signature goal in mind when they created the website. As with other online petition sites, change.org just increases the target as new signatures are added.
"This tax will kill tourism, kill job creation, and send B.C. into an economic tailspin," writes one of the first people to sign the petition.
The woman who created the online petition is an Alberta resident who bought a Kelowna vacation home in 2006.
"I consider the Okanagan home," she writes.
"My husband was raised in Coquitlam and attended UBC. We will retire there in a few short years. We are residents, not speculators."
"We and many of our friends and family from B.C., Alberta, and Saskatchewan have visited our Okanagan home and spent many weeks and months there as residents," she writes.
"We spend thousands of dollars in (the Okanagan) every year."
For the owner of a $600,000 home in Kelowna or West Kelowna that is owned by someone who does have income in B.C., and who does not rent the property out on a longterm basis, the speculation tax will be $12,000, on top of regular property taxes.
"I think the real estate market is just going to get torpedoed by this tax," Sawatzky said.
"It might be hardest at the top end, but the effects are going to filter down.
"It's pretty frightening to think someone sitting in Victoria can just, at the stroke of a pen, take an action that's going to wipe out some people's life savings and freeze up the economy," Sawatzky said.