Empty homes tax is a shameful abuse of power

Of the numerous offensive, vaguely totalitarian initiatives inflicted on Vancouverites by Mayor Gregor Robertson and the Visionistas, the Empty Homes Tax must be the worst.

I was reminded of this last week when city hall mailed us and every other residential property owner a cheerful notice reminding us that we no longer have control over how we use our private property. You know, the homes we all bought with money from our own efforts, in most cases over several decades?

The city propaganda mill reminded — well, threatened, really — every Vancouver homeowner that we now must either occupy or rent out our properties by July 1 for the rest of the year or face an additional EHT of one per cent of its assessed value.

Think about that. It means that if you own a house in Vancouver worth, say, $2 million — a not uncommon figure these days — and it’s unoccupied for more than half the year, the city will fine you $20,000 on top of its already outrageously high property taxes.

Yes, I know that the rental vacancy rate is absurdly low in the city and, as a result, rents are high and tenants are occasionally abused by unethical landlords. I also know that there are those in either the eat-therich crowd or others who hold negative views of foreign investors who think Vision’s new tax is just swell.

But how are the problems of low vacancy or high rents the responsibility of private homeowners? Isn’t ensuring that there is enough affordable rental housing the job of city council?

Robertson and Vision have been in power since 2008 — nearly nine years. Just because they’ve failed over that time at encouraging the construction of enough middle-income housing — all the while taking in millions of dollars in donations from developers who build other forms of expensive housing and, at times, sell them to foreign buyers — doesn’t give them the right to bully property owners into either renting out their properties against their will or facing large fines.

It’s a shameful abuse of power, not that anyone should expect anything less from this mayor and the rabid ideologues in Vision, whose views on private property apparently mirror what one would expect in Stalinist Russia.

Getting beyond the fact that city hall should have no say in whether someone wishes to leave their home unoccupied, what if someone can’t find a renter — or find one willing to pay a reasonable rent, given the value of many Vancouver homes?

What if their place is worth, say, $5 million, which should generate a rent of about $15,000 a month? How does forcing that property into the rental market contribute to affordable housing? Due to city hall extortion, should that homeowner be forced to rent their expensive home for $1,500 a month?

While some would say, “Sure, why not, who cares about the rich homeowners, especially if they are foreign owners,” where does this kind of thinking end? Principles are important.

Will the city next force people to rent out basement suites in their private homes when they no longer need the rent and would rather not live with strangers? What about empty bedrooms, which are actually the cheapest form of potential accommodation? Or how about forcing all new homes to have basement suites or laneway housing. These aren’t outrageous possibilities. Once we allow city hall, unprincipled politicians and their backers to coerce homeowners into solving a problem that is the responsibility of government, who knows what intrusion into our rights will be next?

Then there is the way Vision has set up the tax, which requires an expensive new bureaucracy and the help of citizen snitches to rat out people who leave their homes empty. That sounds like the behaviour of totalitarian societies that the West has traditionally fought against.

With the 100th anniversary of Canada’s victory at Vimy Ridge in the First World War now being honoured, I wonder what all those fallen heroes would think about the casual way in which some Canadian politicians interfere with our rights?

I can’t image that this tax will survive a court fight which, oh great, we’ll all get to pay the legal fees in trying to defend it. But if that fails, dumping this unfair tax should be the first thing on the agenda of whatever party inevitably ends Vision’s run in office.