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And this, for the cherry on top: The surplus allowed the government to scrap a planned four-per-cent increase in medical service plan premiums. It wasn’t as tasty a treat as an announcement to revamp or scrap the loathsome MSP entirely would have been. But it did make the medicine go down more easily.

Overall, the windfall made B.C. the brightest light on the country’s economic horizon. And those dire predictions of house-impoverished millennials fleeing Metro Vancouver and B.C. for cheaper house prices? It hasn’t happened. Net inter-provincial immigration has increased year over year for the last three years. You go where the work is.

So, good news all around.

But: De Jong’s figures showed just how stark B.C.’s economic dependence on real estate has become. Real estate-related taxes are now the government’s single largest revenue generator. They not only outstripped the $1.2 billion gambling brings in — which is pernicious enough — but they also surpassed the tax revenue, individually, from forestry, mining, natural gas and all other resource industries. Only when you combine the tax revenue from those resource industries do they bring in more than real estate, and just by a few decimal points.

None of this takes into account the economic spin-offs that a hot real estate market generates. An angry public may chafe at the rising unaffordability of the market, and they may rightly grow livid at the influx of laundered monies, tax cheats and real estate scammers our hapless enforcement agencies have proven either too inept or too understaffed to catch.