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Metro Vancouver’s rapidly rising housing prices should not be touched by governments, said high-profile realtor Layla Yang.

“This is Vancouver and Canada — and it’s a free-market economy. No one can stop it.”

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Many Canadians share Yang’s resolute free-market worldview, which maintains the unrestricted movement of money and migrants is not only inevitable, but moral.

Whether it’s related that Yang has recently been accused of threatening the life of an ethnic Chinese Vancouver homeowner on behalf of her Mainland Chinese clients, the realtor’s vigorous defence of the unregulated market carries clout in high places.

Supporters of Yang’s view, called neoliberals, include development industry lobbyists who claim the B.C. government’s new 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers of Metro Vancouver residential real estate contravenes the North American Free Trade Agreement.

They’re attacking the tax on foreign owners even while unrestricted economic globalization is increasingly being hammered in other parts of the world, including even in the U.S. — by Donald Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) and, mildly, by Hilary Clinton.