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Premier John Horgan likes to remind people about his Irish roots, something he did again this week when asked if B.C. will ban foreign real-estate purchases.

“I’m a child of an immigrant — I don’t think that’s the way we should proceed,” Horgan said.

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“British Columbia is the gateway to Canada, and I don’t believe we should be curbing people from coming here.”

To Green party Leader Andrew Weaver, the comment betrayed a fundamental ignorance of the housing affordability crisis in B.C.

“I was shocked by that,” Weaver told me Wednesday.

“The problem is not immigrants coming here to live and work,” Weaver said. “The problem is the people who don’t come to live here. It’s about speculators outside of Canada using our real-estate market to park offshore capital, driving up prices for those who do live here.”

Weaver has called on the Horgan government to ban foreign real-estate purchases as one way to address a distorted market where Metro Vancouver prices jumped 65 per cent in just three years. The ban should not apply to legal immigrants or refugees living in Canada, he said.