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“The tax on foreign purchasers in British Columbia has done exactly what the government and what citizens hoped it would do, and that is slow down the tremendous growth in the cost of housing in the Lower Mainland,” declared Premier Christy Clark in the legislature last week.

“We did it. The NDP opposed it. It turned out that it did exactly what we expected it would do.”

“I know the foreign tax was not popular with developers,” she added later in the house. “But I do know that it’s popular with British Columbians … It’s been popular because it works.”

In other words, unfurl a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

I don’t know what planet the premier is on if she thinks she’s dealt with housing affordability in Metro Vancouver

Yet, despite the premier’s enthusiastic rhetoric, the housing affordability crisis appears still very much alive in the Lower Mainland.

The foreign buyer tax served to vent the public’s frustration with a small subset of the problem — mainly, wealthy offshore Chinese investors who didn’t pay taxes here — but it doesn’t appear to have addressed the root of the issues that drove two years of skyrocketing home prices.

Whether that actually matters in the minds of voters on May 9 is an open question.

This week’s tax exemptions will mark one of the last tweaks to the government’s suite of housing reforms before it heads into the election campaign. After first refusing to intervene a year ago, the Liberals have since stripped Realtors of their self-policing powers, pledged $500 million in new affordable housing construction, banned shadow flipping of properties, created a government-backed down payment loan program, and offered municipalities cash incentives to clear a backlog of approvals for housing projects.