Gherardo Gennaro Caracciolo – What Vancouver’s empty home tax really means for Canada’s housing supply

Published in The Hub.

The Canadian housing market is in turmoil. Supply has lagged far behind demand as the population surges. This imbalance has led to soaring property prices, high rents, and increased homelessness.

The situation calls for urgent action, and while long-term solutions, like building more homes, are essential, policymakers are also deploying short-term measures—most notably, vacant property taxes. As these policies are becoming increasingly popular, the potential impact and drawbacks of such taxes call for careful examination.

My new C.D. Howe Institute publication with Enrico Miglino aims to shed further light on this matter by using Vancouver’s empty homes tax as a case study. Implemented in 2017,…

Tingting Zhang – Unlocking Potential: How to Speed Internationally Educated Nurse Certification

Dahir, Robson – Cities sit on too much cash. Here’s how they could help with Canada’s housing crisis

Published in The Globe and Mail.

The short supply and high cost of housing are top-of-mind concerns for many Canadians. So it is necessary to pay more attention to the quirks of municipal financial management, as cities budget for and finance infrastructure in ways that can slow construction and raise costs.

Many of Canada’s major cities are sitting on large amounts of cash that they collected before – often years ago – the capital projects they were collected to fund are under way. If cities matched the revenues they collect more closely with the expenses they incur, we could enjoy more and less expensive housing.

Panic over cities’ budgets is an annual ritual. And when Ontario municipalities gather in Ottawa this…

Bourque, Caracciolo – Financial regulation needs constant pruning

Published in the Financial Post

Regulation is an important part of Canada’s financial landscape. But to ensure the rules support an efficient, effective financial regulatory framework regulators need to be “constant gardeners.”

Canada has 44 different federal and provincial financial regulators and, as our recent analysis for the C.D. Howe Institute shows, the word count of their various rules and mandates continues to rise significantly year over year. The rules’ predominant focus is on risk reduction and consumer protection. Much less attention is paid to market efficiency, innovation and growth — though in the big picture they are at least as important. Our research shows that the balance is almost five-to-one: 85 per…

Why an Empty-Homes Tax Doesn’t Solve the Housing Crisis with Gherardo Caracciolo

Why an Empty Homes Tax Doesn’t Solve the Housing Crisis with Gherardo Caracciolo

If the goal of a vacant-homes tax is to improve housing affordability, it doesn’t work. But if its goal is to improve housing availability, it does. That’s the conclusion of a new C.D. Howe Institute report called “Ripple Effects: The Impact of an Empty-Homes Tax on Canada’s Housing Market”. The authors used Vancouver’s 2017 empty-homes tax as a case study for implementing the tax across the country. 

Michael Hainsworth speaks with Gherardo Caracciolo, one of the authors of the report, about the study and what it tells us about improving availability and affordability in the Canadian residential real-estate market.

Ari Van Assche – Let’s be careful how we de-risk supply chains

Published in the Financial Post. 

With the recent wrap-up of Ottawa’s month-long public consultation on levying tariffs on electrical vehicles (EVs) made in China, let’s paraphrase a story Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman once used to explain the often under-appreciated benefits of free trade:

Consider a Canadian entrepreneur who starts a new business that uses secret technology to transform Canadian lumber and canola into affordable EVs. She is lauded as a champion of industry for her innovative spirit and commitment to Net Zero. But a suspicious reporter discovers that what she is really doing is exporting Canadian-made lumber and canola and using the proceeds to purchase Chinese-made EVs. Sentiment turns sharply…

Eichenbaum, Alexopoulos, and Kronick – Lagging Productivity not Just a Number, it’s Making us Poorer

The Big Squeeze: Lessons from the Trans Mountain Pipeline about the Costs of Invisible Bottlenecks

Trans Mountain Bottlenecks Squeezed $1.5B from BC Lower Mainland Residents

Glen Hodgson – The Lessons from the Jasper Wildfire

Graph of the Week: New Motor Vehicle Registrations in Canada