A report from the Globe and Mail in Canada. "Not so long ago, real estate industry and government officials were doing their best to shut down concerns that skyrocketing housing prices in Vancouver and Toronto were related to non-resident buying. As it turns out, they were very wrong."

"'Basically, if we put every residential property unit that was built in the city of Vancouver from 2006 to 2017 into a single building, every tenth unit [and a bit more] would have been owned by somebody who doesn’t live in the country,' says Andy Yan, urban planner and director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program."

"And new builds were a particular draw. Non-resident owners played a part in 19.2 per cent of Vancouver condos built between 2016 and 2017. In other words, almost 20 per cent of condos built that year had at least one non-resident on title. Also, these rates do not include pre-sale purchases, or what units were not owner-occupied and held as investments. The study authors did not provide data on the source countries of origin for non-resident owners."

"'The summary of all this is the globalization of Canadian residential real estate,' Mr. Yan said, 'and what are you going to do or not do about it, on a federal, provincial and local policy basis? This is about transparency, taxation and fairness, and how we build housing and for who, in our communities.'"

"Josh Gordon, assistant professor at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University, says that the delay of such important data has likely been a setback. He points out that industry voices used the previously limited CMHC data to bolster their arguments that foreign buying was exaggerated. Prof. Gordon had questioned the CMHC’s reports at the time, and received some flak for it."

"'Imagine in 2015 if we had a sense that non-resident buyers were buying 15 per cent or so of new condos. How would that have changed the nature of the debate? Would that not have indicated that there was an issue that needed addressing?,' Prof. Gordon asks."

From Burnaby Now. "For years, the previous government told us overseas money into housing was coming in small amounts - barely enough to make any difference."

"With that having been thoroughly debunked, and frankly impossible, we are now discovering that a large portion of the money has arrived via the fentanyl trade. So when I walk with my son past a person who could very well be lying dead on the street from a fentanyl overdose, am I supposed to be grateful for the small possibility my future is more secure because I’m a property owner? That is not the type of equity I want."

"Money laundering is not a victimless crime. Drug trafficking is not a victimless crime. Prostitution is not a victimless crime. Pricing a generation out of property ownership is not a crime, but it does have many, many victims. These are the connected crimes that our government is somehow not capable of protecting us from."

"As we are seeing with the recent stayed charges in recent high profile money laundering cases, it is lucrative to launder the proceeds of fentanyl trafficking into Vancouver real estate, with zero risk. But the largest crime could still be happening. Is our democracy under attack by criminal elements? These are very serious times on the west coast, and require a serious response."

"Allowing money laundering into the real estate market was apparently government policy for years. Allowing fentanyl traffickers to clean their money through our casinos was apparently government policy for years. Local taxpayers are not only faced with reduced economic opportunity because of it, we are faced with the prospect that we are, in fact, subsidizing it."