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B.C. Attorney General David Eby and anti-money-laundering expert Peter German were in Ottawa this week telling a parliamentary committee about how the transnational rich are pumping billions of dollars into B.C. real estate by using bare trust loopholes and other techniques that make it possible for them to avoid paying B.C.’s property transfer taxes, the foreign-buyers tax and federal capital gains taxes.

Arguing that the federal government’s anti-corruption measures have been a “colossal failure,” Eby confirmed his government is preparing to create a “beneficial ownership database” that would require public disclosure of the actual owners behind thousands of trusts and numbered companies. “The bottom line for British Columbians is they want to know who owns the property and they want to know where the money’s come from.”

The fact that massive volumes of foreign capital have long been fuelling the housing markets of Metro Vancouver, Toronto and elsewhere is no longer in serious dispute in Canada. Polling shows the public is intensely concerned. And even mortgage-lending banks are admitting to the crisis.

This month David McKay, head of the Royal Bank of Canada, said foreign wealth is “distorting” the country’s over-heated housing markets by adding “gasoline” to it. “We do not need foreign capital using Canadian real estate as a piggy bank.”

McKay’s warning comes on the heels of a 2017 report by one of Metro Vancouver’s top housing analysts, Richard Wozny (who died in January), that shows how a “large, mysterious, untaxed pool of international capital” is being converted into speculative investment in residential real estate. Much of that investment, Wozny discovered, is being subsidized by tax avoidance and evasion, which hurts the tax-paying middle class.