First time home buyers will not be charged GST (5%) when buying a home, as long as the place they’re buying costs less than $1M. This means that people buying a home for the first time will save up to $50k on their purchase.
Edit: Note, GST is mostly only charged when buying newly built homes, so this won’t have any effect for people buying used homes.
I generally agree with you, but there’s some complexity.
Change all those things too quickly and housing plummets in value. That’s great for buyers, but bad for sellers. Some old people have most of their life savings wrapped up in their houses, and some are even using reverse mortgages to make ends meet.
At the least though, they should tax those things, and ramp up the taxes so they’re really painful. If an ultra-rich foreigner wants to own a house in Canada and is willing to pay huge taxes for that privilege, maybe that’s OK because those taxes can be spent on housing solutions for everyone else.
I don’t care if houses plummet in value. You want to invest? You gotta assume the risk, just like in the stock market. And peppery prices are way over inflated anyway.
And if we limit who can buy these properties to Canadians and PRs and limit the number of properties per person you won’t have a hoarding problem. And everyone will have better access to housing.
Just like any form of investment, diversifying is important. If someone is 100% invested in Loblaws stock, do you expect the government to defend Loblaws to protect their investment just because they’re relying on that to retire? The people made the choice to depend on a single volatile investment to retire, it means they took a chance that its value could drop.
Hell, it could happen for a bunch of other reasons, one bad neighbor fucking up their lot and your home loses value.
Yeah, Boomers getting special protections is kind of annoying.
A generation of millenials were told to go to post secondary no matter the cost and then when we did and incurred a ton of debt but the good jobs that were promised to us weren’t there, the reaction was “oops, oh well, get fucked I guess”.
Maybe if we stopped funneling a billion dollars into “managing” our CPP plan into poorer performance and used that money to increase CPP payouts instead, boomers could afford more of a hit on their housing.
I do wonder if another large contributing factor is that most of our MPs have conflicts of interest when it comes to the real estate market.
Not to burst your bubble buddy but it’s not just boomers who reaped the benefits, the X and Y generations did as well. Many millennials are over 40 with a career, a house, a family, all the typical stuff boomers are known for. I’m under 40 and already sold a condo for profit and we sold a cottage for profit which allowed us to buy a bungalow that we can afford on a single income and that will be paid in by the time we turn 50.
Older millennial here. Boomers bought their homes in their 20s.
Guess how long it took me to afford my tiny condo?
I bought mine… In my 20s. Without help and with a middle class background.
So yeah, experiences vary but things are really getting bad since the end of the Y generation, but most of the Ys will have had it pretty great in comparison.
Bought mine at 39. In 2019. And was only able to afford it because I have a partner with whom I bought it, who suddenly received a huge amount in backpay.
As I said, experiences vary, but looking at statistics millennials are on average very well off and catching up on previous generations.
Sure, I get what you’re saying. But, from a practical point of view, older people vote, so the government isn’t likely to want to piss them off.
I just think this is realistically going to take decades to fix. We need to get back to thinking of housing as a boring expense, not a huge investment. That’s going to take a long time to unwind.
That’s why you begin by taking advantage of the incoming boomer drop off. They’re gonna start dropping fast. Unfortunately, that’s what most of the wealthy and powerful want to take advantage of too.
As long as our population is growing, the death of boomers isn’t going to make a difference.
I don’t know if the baby boomers dying is going to be a big sudden event. If you look at the population pyramid, many boomers are already gone. The rest are going to trickle out over several decades.
Boomers are ‘46-‘64, the oldest boomers are just now turning 80.
Right, and a lot of boomers never made it to 80. If you look at that population pyramid, the deaths really start once people hit 60, which was 2 decades ago for the first people in the baby boom generation. It looks like roughly 1/3 of the oldest boomers are already gone. The youngest boomers are 60, so about 1/3 of them will die in the next 20 years or so.
It’s not going to be a big, sudden event.