Closing The Divide, 5

Racism has no place in this argument. Let me repeat: racism has no place in this argument. It doesn't matter whether the millionaires buying up luxury homes and properties in Vancouver are from China, India, Romania, or Mauritania. I have heard the race card get flipped back and forth in this quarrel and it is tiresome, nerve-wracking and boring. On one side you have those who associate race with real estate and every time they see an Asian person in a wealthy neighbourhood they seem almost ready to organize a lynch mob. Equally exasperating are the politically correct thought police who scream "racism!" whenever it is mentioned that a huge majority of these luxury home buyers come from China. Funny how in Costa Rica, whenever anyone suggests that offshore ownership of real estate by wealthy white Americans and Germans, no one plays the race card. It isn't about race, but our barmy white eggheads and other upper middle class idiots seem to believe that racism is something that only happens in the hearts and minds of Caucasians. Racism is a sad and ugly reality all over the world and everyone bears some guilt. What is particularly annoying is the way some whine "racist" when it is simply their unacceptable behaviour or attitudes that are being addressed, but they assume that because they are not white, then that must be the only reason they are being singled out for being jerks: like the young Asian male on the Canada Line when I confronted him for mocking a special needs adult in a wheelchair. Instead of accepting the rebuke he called me a racist, for telling him that he was behaving like a jerk. Which is to say, the nasty Asian kid was a jerk. Not for being Asian, but for using his race as a smokescreen to hide from having to face his stupid and ugly behaviour. /although there is a certain truth to the allegations of foreigners driving up property values and by extension the cost of housing here, we really have to consider who some of them are and why they are able to do this. I have already mentioned that our governments, home owners, and the property developers have the lion's share of responsibility for letting things get this bad. Rapacious real estate agents are always a disaster waiting to happen, and the complete lack of ethics on the part of other parties have simply opened the floodgate and also to millionaires from China, some of whom are turning our city into a lovely little laundromat, but many others are likely quite innocent, and simply want to raise their families in a cleaner, healthier and freer environment than the industrially polluted charnel house that the communist government has changed China into. I do not blame desperate people for wanting to improve their quality of life and create opportunity for their children. I am completely in favour of the lovely diversity that they help contribute to our developing Canadian culture. On the other hand, these are consumer immigrants with likely little interest or investment in really contributing to this country outside of their taxes and this is one concern that needs to be addressed. Canada needs immigrants, but Canada particularly needs immigrants who are going to respond with generosity and altruism and gratitude to the very generosity and altruism that we are offering to them and to all newcomers to this country. Property ownership and housing badly need to be reconsidered and reconfigured in this country. We need to move away from the idea of housing as investment and market commodity, and to enshrine the UN endorsement of housing as a human right. Once this little bit of altruistic common sense has seeped into the thinking of our elected government officials, then just maybe enough restructuring will occur to tame and domesticate the capitalist beast of property development, to encourage house-owners to change their thinking into a more generous and communitarian construct, and to rein in the rapacious crows of the real estate industry. Much tighter controls on moneyed immigration are going to be have to put in place, with very strict and loophole proof legislation to prevent property investment that serves only foreign interests and does nothing but harm to the communitarian fabric of our cities and nation.