LAUTENS: Homeowner grant well past its best-before date

Battle stations, baby boomers! Put down that third martini –you are in danger of imminent attack by swarms of envious, property-starved millennials!

If you haven’t read Stephen Price’s trumpet blast rallying the generation hopelessly doomed to shabby rentals or monastic lives in their parents’ basement, renew your subscription to Maclean’s magazine and backdate it to the Jan. 16 issue. (His article drew such reaction, argumentative but polite, that a second ran in the Jan. 27 issue.)

Maclean’s describes him as “an educator, borderline millennial and renter who lives in Vancouver.” In fact Price, 36, thrives in the very bosom of West Vancouver, or at least its left breast – he’s a Grades 4-5 teacher at Eagle Harbour school, his wife works for a charity, and they have a five-year-old son, Matthew. Price spent 10 years as an education adviser for UBC and SFU before choosing to move from education bureaucrat into the teaching trenches. He’s also a federal Liberal who worked in Pamela Goldsmith-Jones’s successful campaign for Parliament.

In essays of annoying logic and alarming clarity, Price denounces the shrugged acceptance of the landless fate of the millennials (born 1982-2004), against their perceived oppressors.

Who are? The boomers (born 1946-1964). Many became Vancouver multi-millionaires by buying their houses early and simply breathing in and out for the last 30 years or more. No brains, no jittery stock market investments needed.

Do I exaggerate? Sure, but not much. While the boomers preen atop the third-least affordable real estate in the world – after Hong Kong and Sydney – the millennials are widely described as our first generation sentenced to poorer lives than their parents. (What, poorer than the 1930s Depression victims? But I digress.)

Enough comic relief. Who’s laughing? Price seriously gives voice to what many struggling millennials must privately gnaw on: Not only the hopelessness of amassing a down payment on a “cheap” condo but the sting of being lectured on “building the grit and work ethic that their elders had,” about “their entitlement” and lack of realism, tossing in disapproval that “they can afford a flat-screen television and an iPhone.”

The following gets uncomfortably close to the knuckle: “Newly minted millionaires” worried when the assessed values of their homes soared over the $1.2-million eligibility limit for the $570 homeowners grant – for which Price’s unsparing acronym is HoG. Some seniors moaned. The media sympathized. And the B.C. government jumped, providing the grant to owners of homes up to $1.6 million.

Price is right here – the grant-defenders dead wrong. The grant wrings taxes from tenants, including millennials, to subsidize the relatively (and often grotesquely) well off. A crude political sop, once worthily helping owners of very modest  homes, now far past its best-before date.

What’s to be done? That’s harder. Price suggests the scrapped HoG program – $820 million, he says – could be better used as an annual $1,000 grant to every B.C. child, or to lower soaring university tuition. I’m more wary of Price’s other proposals: “Should government be in the business of keeping seniors in homes they cannot afford? Seniors who can’t afford to keep million-dollar homes have options. They can take a renter, they can downsize, they can take out a reverse mortgage.”

Steady on, Mr. Price. “Taking a renter” sounds easy. Ain’t. Especially for the old. Even a good tenant is a trial; a bad one, a nightmare. “Downsizing” is not only physically brutal but an agonizing forced march down memory lane. And I’d need another column to express hatred of those cunning, relentlessly televised commercials for reverse mortgages, brilliantly described by a critic as “perfectly suited for people who hate their children.”

Price’s views, notably favouring a property surtax – a more elegant way “to reduce foreign capital flows into Canada’s cities than the new foreign buyer’s tax” – deserve more space than available here. But keep in mind the Old Frenchman’s wisdom: The unfairness of inequality is surpassed only by the attempt to force equality.

It invariably screws up, sometimes bloodily.

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Such is my perversity that the more Justin Trudeau disenchants those who voted for him, the more he notches up in my regard. He’s becoming a Stephen Harper with charm.
Take electoral reform. Trudeau is ringingly right to break his campaign promise and to leave bad enough alone. In the tiny space remaining, I’ll make it simple for its zealots: Hey, guys, how about sharing the Stanley Cup with the four best teams, eh?

• • •

Please, can’t Vancouver have just a little bit of global warming?

Former Vancouver Sun columnist Trevor Lautens writes every second Friday on politics and life with a West Vancouver bias. [email protected]

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