Foreigners, especially the billionaire type, can and have been setting up shell corporations through which to purchase Canadian real estate. The proposed measure will do nothing to stop this practice.
The measures proposed by the Canadian government are likely just political posturing and indented to "pull the wool over the eyes" of Canadian voters because the housing bubble/crisis has reached epic proportions and everyone is talking about it.
Cripes. This is crazy good. I read for about 30 mins. This feels like The Onion from 10 years ago! Example headline: <<Gay teen moves to Toronto, must once again live in closet>> Perfect fit with this discussion!
We don't have implementation of the bill yet, just the budget line. Obviously the government knows about this problem, so if they take measures to prevent it, then we'll know they are actually serious.
Note that a corporation is not consequence free. An owner occupied home pays no tax on capital gains. A corporation owned one is double taxed.
The typical workaround in UK is that instead of selling the house, the corporation that directly or or directly owns it is sold instead, usually on a tax haven.
> The typical workaround in UK is that instead of selling the house, the corporation that directly or or directly owns it is sold instead, usually on a tax haven.
Couldn't that be addressed by regulating based on the beneficiary owners, rather than whatever legal entity is the technical owner, and having onerous penalties (e.g. forfeiture) if the beneficiary owner is misreported or obscured?
The British Columbian government is working on a Beneficial Owners Registry that would attempt to address this issue, though there was a recent article that suggested the registry was struggling to get set up. It's a tough problem.
> government knows about this problem, so if they take measures to prevent it
As a casual watcher of Yes, (Prime) Minister I'm sure they will take measures to get some votes but not solve the problem. The sweet spot is the point where you can gather most vote with a measure that causes as little change to the existing problem as possible.
I think if the corporations/foreigners but to rent, this is OK--the house is on the rental market and doesn't sit empty.
The problem arises if ppl park money in the real estate and the units are empty:
- This is often "luxury" housing which prevents a more regular buyer/renter-friendly housing units to be built.
Another problem is that some units are converted to airbnbs, and they start to compete on the hotel/business/vacation short-term rental market instead of being rent out for long term for people who live/work in the area.
I'm based in the EU, and this is what I've seen in some of the cities/neighborhoods here. I know very little about Canada's real estate market.
In Poland another phenomenon (not sure how widespread outside of PL) is that ppl buy large-ish apartments and split them into multiple rooms or studios and rent them out to students or ppl early in their career. This inflates prices (as the capital that would have been invested in the stock market goes to housing), but otherwise the number of units increases, so probably less of an issue in the grand scheme of things.
this statement only matters for the current conversation if taxes raised through this mechanism helped maintain property price levels where the taxes are being raised.
Could a better thought out measure achieve the same goals? How would you do it?
I feel a strong tax on houses you don't personally live in (because you rent them or because you're a company) could be efficient, but I'd love to hear other people's take on the subject.
Which is an incentive to not sell and instead take out a low interest loan using the properties as collateral. Many cities do have a Homestead exemption which reduces the real estate tax for primary residences.
Why should investment properties be taxed worse than say, stocks?
If property is expensive, it means there's a demand for it. The price is a good signal that the area needs more properties built. It's only the gov't (local gov't perhaps, or NIMBYs) that are stopping it from happening.
Raising taxes isn't going to fix the problem. It only forces existing investors who are on the margins to get pushed out.
It is not a fundamental human need to live in a super cute townhome in a hot walkable neighborhood near lots of other people you’d like to socialize with. If you want free housing, it’s out there, just not where you want it.
shelter is a fundamental need, not the desire to own an asset. You do not need to purchase, as renting is much cheaper (esp. at current asset prices).
And while you cannot create more land (tho tell the dutch that!), you can build more dense. And in an area of growing population, this might be a good solution, as demonstrated in many other cities. However, people who would prefer a single family home with a backyard must be prepared to pay a premium for this privilege.
And my proposal of more investment will indeed help alleviate the lack of shelter by incentivizing more to be built! Taking away investment money for it will only mean a different group losing out vs the existing group. Policies shouldn't decide winners and losers - policies should be made win-win.
Only 50% of the gain included for taxation. One could include more (say 75%).
They could also bring in additional property transfer taxes for reach home, taxing people more for each additional property they buy. Singapore does this.
I think Switzerland requires some swiss ownership threshold. From the top of my head it's over 50% owned by the end natural/physical persons. Even trough shell corporations.
Otherwise hike the tax on real estate while reducing at the same time taxes on local residents.
> The measures proposed by the Canadian government are likely just political posturing and indented to "pull the wool over the eyes" of Canadian voters because the housing bubble/crisis has reached epic proportions and everyone is talking about it.
Politics, particularly here in the west, is beginning to feel like exclusively this to me.
There is no law yet so no implementation that shell companies can skirt. You are getting ahead of the horse. This is a signal from the Canadian government to foreign investors that Canadian housing could no longer be a safe investment for their money shortly.
It's really crazy to me that so many people have apparently come to believe that it is bad for countries to implement measures that protect the interests and well-being of their own citizens above those of foreigners.
I completely agree, except I think trains have a much higher competitive range, possibly up to 1,000 km .
With a plane 1,000 km trip including all things you mention like arriving at the airport in advance, boarding, finding your way back to the city center, etc. would come easily to 4-5 hours when you calculate it door-to-door. This could be comparable to a train at 200-250 km/h.
Also, trains tend to be more punctual and less prone to delays compared to planes. And arriving in the city center as opposed to 40-50 kms out is a big advantage indeed.
I agree here, some lines and trains in Europe go up to 300 kmh (last one I've tried was actually in Spain, on par with French TGV).
Plus airports have this pesky habit of losing all your luggage, even on fairly trivial flights. Recently my journey was Geneva -> Barcelona -> Seville, and they lost my big luggage with complete paraglider (4000+ euro) and other stuff (cca 1000 euro). For a week, they couldn't even locate it, had to buy tons of stuff and rent basic paraglider from school and I started saying goodbye to all equipment. No real compensation for anything. Then it just showed up in place I told them to deliver to, not even apology (vueling airlines, but I blame airports for this more than airline).
That's just one sample out of quite a few on how to ruin your dream vacation by flying.
I did 1000km in airplane (also i was private pilot) and it's a 1h trip. Barcelona -> Santiago is max 1h. I can spend another hour getting into the airport, the total trip will not go more than 3 hours, but in Train it will take me 8hs.
I think it's really difficult to average 200-250 km/h over 1,000 km with a train. I would guess the trains that average that speed would be much shorter trips.
Various Shinkansen lines average that much or higher for long stretches. To be fair, there isn't a 1000km line in Japan, but ~500km at those speeds should indicate that it's possible. Sanyo runs at near maximum operating speed (300km/h) for most of its >500km run.
We don't have such train lines that do that much kms. We have fast lines, like max 600km. Longer lines have trains who are +180max. And each trip is like 7-8 hours.
Other countries should probably follow suit. Where I live the levels of Russian financed misinformation is intense and surreal. I don't mean just social media trolls which FB is awash with but also paid operatives working on the ground and in communities and instigating against vaccines, NATO, EU and other topics key to Kremlin backed propaganda.
Where I live (south of Europe) you can tell very easily what fruit or vegetables are in season:
1. They taste orders of magnitude better compared to when they are not in season (e.g. oranges when sourced from nearby Greece or Turkey, as opposed to ones shipped all the way from South Africa or Australia)
2. They are much cheaper to buy on local fruit and vegetable stands. Also, big chains like Lidl or Kaufland run good sales on them as well.
Maybe the goal of the Russian government was to block the Amazon and Google APIs in the first place, and they used Telegram as a convenient excuse. Just a thought.
It would actually seem like an ideal way to force the adoption of native cloud service replacements (regardless of quality or competitiveness of the offering). Russia has tended to go that way with most things, whether Mail.ru, VK or Yandex. Russia has a very long history of being insular like that and the powers that have dominated Russia the last century have a vested interest in keeping it that way.
The only reason why local hosters are making money is local personal data law which restricts that PD of russian citizen should be stored inside Russia, because their prices and level of service is non-competitive to i.e. DO or OVH.
I wouldn't say the Russian government cares a lot about its main players, like Chinese do.
Actually, they've spent millions building Sputnik — a government owned search engine that nobody used.
If they were just being protectionist, I'd be able to understand them in some way. But it's deeper.
I have a feeling the wealth distribution in the years prior to WWII was pretty similar to where we are or are headed. I wonder if there were comparable data/studies done back then.
It is not just the US. Canada in recent years signed a $15Bln contract to supply the Saudi Arabia rulers with weapons. (I was going to say 'government but 'rulers' feels more appropriate in this case).
Saudi Arabia is at war with Yemen and the war is causing the humanitarian crisis described in the above article.
Same for Italy, we tripled arms sales to them in the last two years and Parliament recently voted not to restrict the flow despite the conflict in Yemen.
Maybe this is because, as someone once put it, Americans don't see themselves as worse off. Rather, they see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"?
...and to me this looks like they've (quite reasonably) reached the decision that skirting labor and transportation regulations is not a legally valid form of "disruption". (See also: Airbnb's ongoing regulatory tussles with various municipalities over what constitutes a "hotel".)
That's not to say that the local taxi interest doesn't have a vested interest in pursuing this - they most certainly do, and they're just as certainly protecting their own interests. Even still, nothing about this ruling strikes me as "protectionist": the court is simply saying "you operate a taxi service, therefore you must follow the same rules as other taxi services". This is quite different from "you operate a taxi service!? Too bad, you can't operate here."
IMHO, "innovation", "competition", "disruption", etc. are not valid reasons to completely ignore laws. I have little sympathy for Uber at this point, since their modus operandi at every turn has been "ignore the laws until someone rules otherwise, then continue to ignore the laws until someone enforces the ruling". That, quite frankly, is bullshit, especially in a case where the relevant laws exist primarily to protect public safety and the rights of employees. (Contrast this with copyright law, which has a rich history of overreach and regulatory capture, and where there is a much stronger moral argument that the laws are unjust.)
...and to me, your opinion is the polar opposite of everything I believe and quite different than the libertarianism tech grew up with.
Laws should always be challenged and dismantled whenever possible. The state should be minimized. That taxis were ever regulated is totally insane and their complete lack of customer service prior to Uber's existence is evidence of that.
You can turn your back on innovation and disruption but some of us will continue to fight for it. Regardless, you can't put the tech genie back in the bottle, so while people like you can make life more difficult for people like me, you can't actually stop technology from innovating.
> your opinion is the polar opposite of everything I believe and quite different than the libertarianism tech grew up with.
> Laws should always be challenged and dismantled whenever possible.
That's a rare belief for a libertarian; like most other ideologies, libertarians usually believe only laws which conflict with their ideology should be challenged and dismantled.
The (capitalist) model of property rights libertarians prefer is itself supported by law, which is quite possible to challenge and dismantle (I can point to organized groups who challenge it everywhere and would dismantle it if they had adequate support), but libertarians don't generally participate in that challenging and dismantling.
I think we spent a lot of time challenging and trying to dismantle digital property rights in the early consumer internet/P2P era.
You're correct in that the laws most likely to be challenged are those in the way of technological progress. I'd also say the laws that empower a growing state apparatus are also likely to be targeted.
The regulations in question here look like an obvious overstep of government into consumer affairs and a resistance against technological and market progress.
I still don't know how anyone who has ever taken a pre-Uber taxi could make an argument against Uber. The market forces alone they've created have improved service 10X in even non-Uber options.
> Laws should always be challenged and dismantled whenever possible. The state should be minimized. That taxis were ever regulated is totally insane and their complete lack of customer service prior to Uber's existence is evidence of that.
When people tell me they can't believe things were regulated, very often it seems like they're not actually sure what the regulations actually are, and why they're there. A lot of regulation covers basic common sense requirements based on what society has learned as a whole. That's not to say all regulation is, and I'm certainly not one to argue against a need for massive red-tape cutting.
So:
.. You don't think Taxi drivers should be mandated to have background checks, to ensure they're not sex offenders, thieves etc. It's really hard to tell when you see someone face-to-face. We've seen Uber already repeatedly struggling with this, being a regular problem early on for them, and eventually giving in to peer pressure to do what Taxicab companies already do, what laws already require. Why should we (the consumer) have to go through the same process over and over again with every Tom, Dick and Harry company that decides they want to drive people around for money? Uber is becoming entrenched, prices are rising. Eventually a new company is going to come along and disrupt the market out from underneath them in some way we don't anticipate right now, and yet again we'll go through sexual harassment etc. of passengers that'll continue for years until the company comes under sufficient pressure to fix their shit.
.. You don't think Taxi drivers should be mandated to have business insurance so that should the driver crash when you're in the vehicle, you're covered?
.. You don't think Taxi drivers should be required to have a vehicle regularly maintained and in good _safe_ working order, so that you're significantly less likely to be involved in an accident, and when it does you're less likely to be seriously injured? Remember that most things that wear out on a vehicle aren't plain to see. It's really easy to keep a car spick and span, while it's about to fall apart underneath.
.. You don't think Taxi cab drivers should be restricted to working no more than 12 hour days, so that they're not falling asleep at the wheel and causing accidents?
No. I don't think those things. I think I as a consumer can pick the ride option I want. I also think Uber benefits from providing a safe and reliable service (which they do).
Have you ever taken an Uber? Have you ever taken a cab? Every Uber ride I've ever taken (a lot, in many different cities) has been more or less pleasant and friction free. Most cab rides have been quite the opposite.
I 100% feel safer in an Uber than in a taxi. Try paying a taxi with a credit card some day and let us know how that goes. At best you'll have to argue with the driver to accept it. Most likely the machine will be "broken".
Looking at 1) the valuation of AirBnB/Uber 2) the amount of actual penalties the courts have meted out, it turns out "completely ignore a subset of laws" is a great way to riches
Because the taxi unions have a far less diffuse interest than the general public does.
Look, I have no idea if the existing rules are sensible or just erected as barriers to new entrants. Probably a bit of both. However, in general, businesses and individuals can't just say: "Nope, the law is stupid so I'll just ignore it."
I may think that things like liquor licenses for restaurants are a scam in many cities in the US (and they often are) but I'll get shut down in a hurry if I serve alcohol without one.
> Why don’t you see consumers or some other group besides the local taxi interest taking them to court?
I've always seen Uber as a taxi service and I have no interest in taking them to court. I've never been tempted to take a traditional taxi service to court either though.
I don't think that really matters though. What is a taxi service? My dictionary says a taxicab is a car licensed to transport passengers in return for payment of a fare. That fits pretty closely to how I use Uber, so I'm fine with calling it a taxi service. It's a duck-typing perspective I guess.
> Is it though? Why don’t you see consumers or some other group besides the local taxi interest taking them to court?
Probably because they often _don't_ need to take them to court. They clarify existing or pass new laws to make the definition of a taxi clearer, or explicitly include "Ridesharing". Also elsewhere Uber has been spending lots of money lobbying government and voters to persuade them to dodge it.
It's all utter bullshit. Uber is a Taxi company. You know it, I know it. That they've managed to persuade government to look the other way while they flaunt important safety regulations has been utterly ludicrous.
I suspect they only got away with it _because_ Taxi unions have been too powerful, and everyone generally hates taking Taxis.
It is largely a matter of standing. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directives leaves most of the details up to member states, but has a hard requirement that competitors have standing to bring legal action against unfair commercial practices [1]. Spain – where this case originated – also allows for consumer organizations to bring suit (but not individual consumers), but those will generally focus their resources on areas where competitors fail to act.
[1] Which was already a common approach in Europe before that directive was enacted.
Well, we can all argue one way or another about how relevant a CS degree would have been. The fact though that the profile was altered and other data deleted remains highly suspicious, if true.
It is super fishy that they got rid of every copy of video interviews with Susan Mauldin right as they were being reported on. I watched the interviews before they got erased and I was shocked that they were ever aired, I'm sure the transcript does not convey as much about how little this person seems to know for being the person in charge of the security of every person's credit files who has credit in the US.
I don't like to see people get shit on (and she looked like a person who was trying hard to do a good job,) but she also looked like a person who was put in that position because someone with a lot of money knew that doing security right would be expensive, and she would be someone to comply.
The measures proposed by the Canadian government are likely just political posturing and indented to "pull the wool over the eyes" of Canadian voters because the housing bubble/crisis has reached epic proportions and everyone is talking about it.