The biggest sole private asset pool in Canada is the combined home equity of Canadian citizens. Over a century of labour, savings and ambition from citizens has created a private housing market worth an estimated $4.7 trillion.
And the Liberals desperately want a piece of it.
For Liberal ideologues, the equity hangs like a plum just waiting to be picked. They won’t be able to resist making a move on it for much longer.
Rest assured; Mark Carney is no less an ideologue than Justin Trudeau was. He is as obsessed with net-zero targets as his predecessor was and to make things worse, Carney is smarter. A witless ideologue is bad enough, but now Canada faces a smart one.
Let’s face it. The net-zero movement has never been about the environment. It is an excuse for policies based on wealth redistribution. The carbon tax proved that clearly.
Canada’s carbon taxes whether provincial or federal had utterly no impact on the environment. Not a single raindrop or snowflake was created by or delayed by the tax. Taxes can’t change weather and the Liberals always knew this. Taxes can shift wealth around though and they used the carbon tax to do it. That’s why carbon tax rebates were issued based on personal wealth.
The personal carbon tax failed by every measure. It didn’t create an equitable workers’ paradise, nor did it bring an end to climate change. It turned into a policy disaster so wildly unpopular among Canadians that the Liberals were forced to dump it. Carney will apply it to companies if given the chance though, so don’t worry, you will still get to pay for it as it trickles down.
The Liberals are campaigning against themselves and the most frightening part of that is that it’s working. People believe that the party obsessed with wealth redistribution and taxing the very breath you exhale has had an epiphany and now support tax cuts and pipeline construction.
All this proves is that the Liberals are a party willing to say anything to get elected. Their ideology hasn’t changed. They are simply suppressing it until the end of the election campaign.
So how are they reconciling it with themselves as their party offers a carbon-copy of the Conservative platform? How does a wealth redistributionist sleep at night when they are abandoning their primary tool to reach into the pockets of citizens?
.They have a grander plan, and it involves the home equity of citizens.
The Liberals have been toying with the notion of taking a bite from the home equity of Canadians for years. They just haven’t been able to find a way to implement it.
The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) is the federal government arm managing home financing. The CMHC has been tasked multiple times and spent hundreds of thousands of tax dollars studying how to implement a home equity tax on primary residences. Each time this leaked into the public, the Liberals denied they were considering such a tax. Then they would dig into the issue again.
The CMHC tapped the wisdom of an extreme activist named Paul Kershaw who manages a group called Generation Squeeze. His focus is on intergenerational wealth redistribution and he sees taxing home equity as a means to his ideological end.
Kershaw referred to homeowners are “lottery winners” and said people who owned homes gained equity while sitting around watching TV. It is a gross insult to the people who scraped and saved to get into the home ownership market and dedicated thousands of hours of their lives to maintaining and upgrading their properties.
Kershaw demonstrates the vilest of politics of envy, where he refuses to acknowledge the right of others to enjoy the fruits of their labour and feels it’s the role of the state to take that equity away from them.
While it's tempting to dismiss Kershaw as just another flake with Marxist leanings, it would be dangerous to do so.
Kershaw counselled the Liberal cabinet directly in a retreat they held on Prince Edward Island less than two years ago. You don’t bring somebody as extreme as Kershaw to lecture your top government lieutenants without a plan to embrace his teachings. Most of the cabinet ministers who sat in on that retreat are still with Carney’s team today.
Trudeau may be gone but the same Liberal snake remains. All they did was change out the head.
If Carney wins the election, he will be faced with a challenge. While he has matched Poilievre promise for promise with vows to cut taxes and expand programs, he hasn’t mentioned cutting a dime of spending.
If spending isn’t cut, how can Carney fund his platform?
A home equity tax would give them just such a tool. They would frame it as an essential measure considering the trade war emergency. They could call it a temporary measure or frame it as something to help the next generation get on its feet. They would say it’s just a little bite and rest assured they will call it “fair”.
Anybody opposing such a move will be called selfish and pilloried in the public eye as the Liberals stoke class division based on age and wealth. It was a formula used by a certain revolution in 1917 and it could be used again. Envy during tough economic times is a strong motivator.
Have you noticed in the last few years there has been a line on your tax return asking about your home equity?
They wouldn’t add that question without a reason. They are already building the runway.
Carney has an ideological agenda and if you think your savings and home equity are immune from it, think again.