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Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised to shine a light on any impacts so-called foreign buyers might be having on Vancouver real-estate prices.

“A re-elected Conservative government will commit to collecting comprehensive data on the foreign non-resident purchase of Canadian real estate and as necessary, in coordination with the provinces, we will take action to ensure any foreign non-resident investment supports the availability and affordability of homes for Canadians,” he said at an August 12 campaign stop in Vancouver.

Harper, who has been in power since 2006, seemed to hint the move is overdue.

“There are real concerns that foreign, non-resident real-estate speculation is the reason some Canadian families find house prices beyond their budgets,” he said, according to a report by Reuters.

“In most developed economies, governments track this kind of information. But governments in Canada have not.

“If such foreign, non-resident buyers are artificially driving up the cost of real estate and Canadian families are shut out of the market, that is a matter we can and should do something about.”

The comments mark Harper’s entry into a debate of considerable political controversy in Vancouver. Through 2015, no other issue has attracted as much media attention in Vancouver (with the possible exception of marijuana) as the suggestion that non-residents are buying condos and houses in numbers great enough to cause a sharp rise in overall prices.

In March 2015, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported the benchmark price for a single-family home on the city’s West Side was $2.4 million; on the East Side, it was $990,800. The same month, an analysis by Bing Thom Architects’ Andy Yan found 66 percent of single-family properties in Vancouver were assessed at $1 million or more. That was double the portion worth that much five years earlier.

In the absence of government data on foreign ownership, speculation about the possible scale of non-citizens’ impact on housing prices has run wild. Efforts to find a quantifiable answer have often focused on indicators that hold little meaning for an ethnically diverse city such as Vancouver; for example, properties purchased by people with “Chinese-sounding names”. That has led some to suggest the debate risks being hijacked by xenophobia and thinly veiled racism.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair was in Vancouver on August 9 and used that opportunity to declare he believes housing is not a privilege but a right. Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau has yet to speak on the issue of housing affordability in Vancouver.