Our February client letter is on the housing bubble casting a pall over Canada’s economic prospects and social stability. The last decade of free money has been anything but. Costs are compounding through reduced household formation, non-replacement birth rates, decreased savings, excessive debt, misallocated capital, and a shortage of investment into longer-term productive sectors, activities and innovation.
For years now, investigative reporter and Wilful Blindness author Sam Cooper has flooded his readers, and all layers of our government, with proof of the money-laundering-inflows helping to make Canadian realty a destructive wild west. The paper trail has been largely ignored. Cooper continued to illuminate this week, see Over $154m tied to detained Chinese-Canadian Oligarch invested in Toronto Real Estate. This is the tiny tip of an iceberg.
As the world hunts to freeze and seize the property of Russian oligarchs, Canada needs to look inward. If the government can shut down the flow of funds to trucker protests, they can certainly curtail large illicit flows. Complexity and platitudes without serious enforcement have to end.
Unaffordable housing prices are no free lunch. Watch why Canadians should care about money laundering in real estate. Here is a direct video link.
