Dear Editor
An open letter to the Honourable Michael de Jong, B.C. Minister of Finance
Dear Minister de Jong:
Having received my assessment notice shortly before you announced the new threshold for the provincial homeowner grant being set at $1.6 million, I am somewhat incredulous at your statement, as reported in the media, that 91 per cent of homeowners in the province will remain eligible for the grant, including 86 per cent of homes in Metro Vancouver. I appreciate that you have the resources to ensure that statement is accurate, but I should really like to know how those numbers are compiled. Obviously they must include mostly highrise apartment properties and are a reflection of the current trend to densification, gentrification, and overall elimination of single-family homes as well as rental housing.
I have done a random check of assessments in my neighbourhood, and I have found only one freestanding house within a couple of blocks of my home that remains eligible for the homeowner grant this year. Without actually counting the number of homes in my locality, which is not upscale by any stretch of the imagination, I would estimate that this eligible homeowner represents about two per cent of homes within 300 metres of my house, and that fewer than five per cent of single family homes in South Burnaby (and a correspondingly lower proportion in Vancouver and the North Shore) will now remain eligible for the grant.
As a matter of policy, I would suggest that in denying single family homeowners the homeowner grant while supporting it for most apartment dwellers you are engaging in an unwarranted exercise of social engineering. The practice of using arbitrary property assessments combined with a single blanket price as the sole criterion for determining eligibility for the homeowner grant is unfair, particularly to seniors like myself, and in my opinion is politically unsound. In the interest of fairness, other criteria that could be readily incorporated in eligibility are length of ownership, age of the improvements, as well as the age of owner/occupant. Please bear in mind that my house is a roof over my head and my home, not a numerical entry in a ledger.
Thomas Hasek, Burnaby
