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.
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.