Symbolism, thy name is Vancouver civic politics.
Two critical tests about occupancy now challenge the administration of the city’s municipal government: what it is doing about empty homes and what it is not doing about busy marijuana dispensaries.
In both cases, the Vision Vancouver tactics tell much about how the city manipulates the community, puts style ahead of substance when it comes to significant issues, and tiptoes so as to sufficiently anesthetize opponents and not antagonize its political base.
Whether these tactics are in the public interest, or just its political interest, is another matter.
The latest gesture came last week as the Vision-led council approved an empty-homes tax: 1% of appraised value annually, effective in 2018, with a long list of exemptions as to render it ephemeral.
The tax deserves our unbridled skepticism. The government got us into this mess, and by golly, it’s going to make sure we get them out of it.
The tax arrives very late in the day, long after those who treat Vancouver property as a collectible commodity have made their biggest gains and long after the council’s developer donors have done the same.
The tax does precious little to address the vulnerability of our market to investors and speculators or to stimulate significant supply of social or rental housing.
It will be an administrative migraine whose only near-term economic impact will be to create jobs in the city’s bureaucracy.
It will encourage us to snitch on neighbouring owners and turn them over to the auditors as if we were in the McCarthy era.
It will serve as a nuisance-like new cost of doing business for property collectors and surely face the same sort of costly court challenge the province is facing on its foreign-ownership tax.
If the city can boast that the public wants something done about vacant property, that it is serious about stimulating rentals, and that it wants a strong new revenue source to build social housing, then why the meagre penalties and extensive exemptions?
Because, of course, it is only serious about one thing: symbolic gestures.
Principal residence? Of course, exempt.
Strata bylaws against rental? Exempt.
Major renovations? Snowbirds? In “supportive” care? Using it as a workplace for six months a year? Exempt.
Considering you’re making double-digit gains on a property these days, Vancouver’s 1% solution doesn’t exactly send you scurrying to Craigslist to post an ad pleading for a renter.
This has an eerie resemblance to what the city has done – mainly not done – about the prolific marijuana dispensaries in our midst.
Even though it has determined that most dispensaries violate the new bylaws, they remain open and flouting the law – even though the city knows they will eventually close by force.
The scandalous, ludicrous difference between this matter and the empty-homes problem is that many pot shop operators are of dubious origin. Who are we kidding about where most are sourcing their products?
They remain open near schools and community centres, inspected irregularly by the small cadre of city staff given the jumbo task of enforcing standards, wrist-slapped by feeble fines they do not generally pay, insulated from police crackdown by city directive, and tepidly threatened with injunctions that will be years in arriving.
In the days ahead, though, the road ahead will be clearer. The federal government will release the preliminary framework for cannabis legalization and in doing so it will make it evident that the city has been irresponsible in waiting too long and doing too little on this frontier.
Once the legitimate business is sanctioned, the police will be asked – far too late for it to be anything but a spectacle – to shutter dozens of illegal shops.
This could be done this afternoon, but the strategy is clearly to let them linger until the law-abiding businesses emerge – a symbol of the city’s leadership culture, unwilling to deny its supporters recreational access to an illegal substance, only too happy to indulge the crime bosses who produce it.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
