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In addition, if a declaration is missed for someone who shouldn’t be subject to the tax, then a proper declaration the following year will lead to the exemption being granted retroactively. So homeowners would have to mess up a few years in a row to have any potential liability.

Third, there is the idea that the “government is accusing us all of being speculators,” since all homeowners need to make a declaration. This again is misleading rhetoric.

To enforce the tax, the government needs to collect basic tax information and link it in a comprehensive way with property ownership. That’s what the form is about, and that’s what will allow them to figure out who the satellite families are.

If the government just politely asked the satellite families to register, and gave a pass to everyone else, then how would they know if satellite families failed to register? It’s only by collecting data on everyone that we can be sure that we’ve identified all the satellite family situations.

That’s why we don’t have road checks with separate “drunk driver” and “everyone else” lanes – the drunk drivers would just drive in the “everyone else” lane.

So what this amounts to is that those who oppose the gathering of data are, wittingly or not, shielding tax avoiders and evaders from scrutiny. To the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in potential revenue.

This is a peculiar stance to take, to put it mildly.

A final point: B.C. has a major money-laundering problem, partly through casinos and partly through real estate. As recent court cases have driven home, money launderers don’t tend to declare much income. So the data gathering associated with the tax will also help us detect and prosecute money laundering, by shooting up red flags around big disparities in house prices and declared income.