Vancouver needs provincial data to make vacancy tax work

VICTORIA — Vancouver’s mayor says new provincial legislation won’t be enough to get a vacancy tax operational unless his city can hammer out an agreement to tap government-held data on home ownership.

Gregor Robertson said enabling legislation the Liberal government will introduce Monday has to be followed by a data-sharing deal, or else Vancouver will be left with no efficient way to determine what is vacant property and might have to rely on citizens filing complaints about their neighbours.

“Without the provincial data, it will be very difficult to administer an empty homes tax,” Robertson said. “So the data sharing is an essential ingredient in putting this together. Enabling it though legislation is a good first step, but it’s not enough to make this viable.”

Vancouver is looking to narrow a list of more than 10,000 potentially vacant houses, condos and townhouses by pinpointing secondary residences people declare in the government homeowner grant program, or through rental income on income tax returns. B.C. driver’s licence data could also shed light on what people declare as their primary residence.

The province has publicly indicated a willingness to share what it has, within the confines of privacy laws.

The city said it’s not necessarily seeking copies of the data, and it might be possible to have the government run its own database analysis to produce a narrowed list of potentially vacant Vancouver homes that city staff could work from.

“What we get from an array of different data sets is the ability to cross reference and identify empty homes," Robertson said. “The more data sets, the easier it is to identify the empty homes.”

When asked about a so-called system of snitching on vacant neighbours, Robertson said “We really don’t want to go there, (but) people might do it anyway.”

The government legislation will come during an emergency summer session of the house, as the B.C. Liberals seek to respond to widespread criticism that they’ve been too slow to react to a hot real estate market that has priced many residents out of home ownership.

The vacancy tax will form one part of a housing omnibus bill, which will also include removing the real estate industry’s right to police itself.

Finance Minister Mike de Jong has hinted there will be other announcements, such as potentially using some of the $1.5 billion government takes in annually through the property transfer tax to fund affordable housing.

“We’re going to share information that we have that will be of assistance to enforce or implement the tax,” de Jong said last week.

Vancouver has yet to decide what tax it will levy upon vacant homes, or how exactly it will go about enforcing its program — other than it intends to target homes left vacant for 12 months a year. But to collect the tax starting next year, it will need a data-sharing deal by this fall, Robertson said.

Community Development Minister Peter Fassbender, who will shepherd the vacancy tax through the legislature because he’s responsible for the Vancouver Charter, said Friday he needs to see a more detailed proposal from Vancouver, but the intention is to help the city.

“The reason we’re calling the legislature back is to clearly give Vancouver what they’ve asked for,” he said. “Beyond that, until they really develop that framework and the details, it’s a little hard to commit.”