All for stricter limits on foreign ownership
The recently submitted letter entitled “Protectionism not the answer to Canada’s ills” couldn’t be more wrong. We no longer face the same challenges we once did in Canada, and our national identity, now continuously under assault by a post nationalist and post modern government and prime minister, is in grave danger.
Instead of harping on about laissez faire neo liberal capitalism we should be looking at our current situation with our eyes wide open and doing something about it. Respectfully, it astonishes me that Mr. Morris can even begin to make the points he did. Anyone looking at our nation can see the obvious.
Thousands of unoccupied homes lie dormant in Vancouver and other Canadian cities because foreign buyers, who consider Canada nothing more that a convenient bolt hole or a vacation spot, have bought up our properties. Business after business are also being sold off to foreign buyers who consider Canada a convenient speculative investment spot and nothing more. The people selling their businesses or houses often only see this as a way to turn a profit or provide themselves with a nest egg, and so they sell.
Our major cities are now, for many Canadians, completely unaffordable because foreign inspired real estate purchases have inflated the prices of homes in urban areas and beyond. It is too expensive to live in many of these places unless, not coincidentally, you are perhaps a wealthy foreign client. Average Canadians can’t afford it.
Don’t believe me? Just read back articles of the Vancouver Sun, particularly by Douglas Todd and others, exposing this. Macleans has done feature articles on it, and it is in the news on a regular basis.
As to money laundering, we can’t afford to be naive. A recent series in a Vancouver newspaper detailed the way casinos were being used to launder foreign money and, in many cases, purchase expensive houses. Everyone knows it is happening all over Canada, in the same way that we know foreign buyers are purchasing our cities and businesses. Just take a trip across the lower mainland and you can see it. And even in smaller towns it is becoming apparent.
Canada, as a nation, has the right to protect itself and to limit foreign control of its cities, real estate market and culture. Mr. Rusland is right. While we shouldn’t practice damaging protectionism, we should practice “protecting” our nation’s identity and its interests. We can only do that by establishing limits on what can and cannot be done by outside interests. Canadians should own their nation, and Canada is not some vague “open zone” or international speculative real estate market for those with deep pockets who could care less about us.
Just as there is a limit to left wing big government regulation, there is also a limit to extremist libertarianism. I’m all for Canada establishing stricter limits on foreign ownership and increasing Canadian possession of our businesses and homes. Considering what is happening now and what could happen in the future, who would not be?
Perry Foster
Duncan