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The tax has yet to be introduced in the legislature but the province described the need to “stabilize B.C.’s out-of-control real estate and rental market” marked by “distorted markets, sky-high prices and empty homes” in its throne speech last month.

The government expects the tax will apply to 15,000 residential properties. Anyone who owns a home but doesn’t live in B.C. and doesn’t rent it out would be subject to the speculation tax, which is one of several measures the province has proposed to make housing more affordable in parts of B.C. and especially the Lower Mainland.

“It’s clearly not a speculation tax,” Osborne said of the tax, which would also hit his own vacation property. A true speculation tax, he said, would apply to people that profit from flipping houses in short periods of time and should specifically target profits from short-term buyers and sellers.

Whether the proposed tax will effectively make houses more affordable in places like metro Vancouver, where the average price of a bungalow was $1.4 million at the end of 2017, according to Royal Lepage, depends on who is granted exemptions, University of British Columbia’s associate professor of economics Joshua Gottlieb said. He thinks any exemptions should be limited to specific groups, like retirees, rather than broad groups, like Canadians outside B.C.

Gottlieb was one of dozens of economists and business professors at UBC to endorse a similar proposal, called the B.C. Housing Affordability Fund, which would have taxed vacant homes and directed the funds to affordable housing projects or to reduce income taxes.