In recent years, Vancouver, on Canada's scenic Pacific coast, has made itself into a laboratory for government policy to tame surging housing costs. Tackling the affordability crisis has become a city-wide obsession, with often-academic debates spilling into newspaper op-eds, talk radio, and coffee shop banter. Among the most controversial positions to emerge is one staked out by Josh Gordon, an assistant professor of political science at Simon Fraser University in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. Gordon attributes much of the runup in Vancouver's home prices to foreign buyers and proposes taxing them at a high enough rate to encourage them to sell. Even he admits the idea seems radical. That's why it was a surprise to hear something like it proposed by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which in November announced a plan for a national tax on foreign, nonresident homeowners as a way to help first-time buyers break into the housing market.
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