EDMONTON - It’s a peachy time to be a homeowner in Metro Vancouver.

Actually, it’s almost always a peachy time to be a homeowner in Canada’s stunningly beautiful west coast metropolis.

With billions of dollars in foreign cash sloshing through the local economy, much of it illicit cash from mainland China, house prices are on fire, as they have been for most of the past 15 years.

Over the past 12 months, the price of a typical single-detached home in Vancouver and neighbouring suburbs like Burnaby, Richmond and West Vancouver has soared by more than $122,000, to nearly $1.08 million.

Got that? Homeowners in Metro Vancouver saw the value of their detached properties jump by roughly $2,350 per week over the past 12 months. That’s more than twice the size of the average Albertan’s weekly paycheque.

So while sipping their Chardonnay and gazing out at the North Shore mountains, Vancouver homeowners pocketed more than 95 per cent of all working Canadians last year, before showing up for a single day at the office.

Now that has to influence the way one sees the world, don’t you think. Really, who needs industry when you live in a picture-perfect, post-industrial city where bank accounts grow fatter by the week, all on their own?

More to the point, it helps explain why residents of the Lower Mainland are so wary of oil pipelines, specifically Kinder Morgan’s proposed $5.4 billion TransMountain pipeline expansion between Edmonton and Burnaby.

Alberta’s energy industry and the Harper government have waged a multi-year campaign to get new oil pipelines to the west coast. It’s a losing proposition, and I fully expect Alberta’s new Premier-designate Rachel Notley to run into the same roadblocks as her predecessors.

Why would Vancouverites risk an oil spill in Burrard Inlet or English Bay, one that could soil the city’s beaches for years and drive a stake through the city’s sizzling property market? It makes no economic sense.

While much of the opposition to bitumen pipelines has focused on environmental issues, notably the costs and complexities of cleaning up a major spill, the key underlying reason for many Vancouverites’ opposition is less high-minded.

It’s really all about the money.

Through geographic and macroeconomic good fortune, Vancouverites have been blessed with one of the world’s juiciest, most generous ATM machines, and they’re not about to jeopardize it.

Who can blame them? Over the past 10 years, the price of a typical single-detached home in Metro Vancouver has more than doubled. Over the past 15 years, it has more than tripled.

Except for brief pullbacks in 2009 and 2013, prices have known only one direction: up. Put differently, owners of single detached homes in Lotus Land have seen their properties jump in value by an average of nearly $50,000 per year since 2000.

When is the last time you had a $50,000 annual bonus? Not lately, I suspect.

Explanations for Vancouver’s lofty real estate prices vary, but one thing is clear: vast sums of money from mainland China have played a big role in driving prices up, especially in high-end neighbourhoods.

The average detached house price in the City of Vancouver is now roughly $1.4 million. For many west-side neighbourhoods, it’s above $2 million.