Trudeau's attack on short-term rental owners will encourage them to not report income

financialpost.com:

Housing affordability and availability is a complex public policy issue. It is unlikely there is one expert who knows it all since it involves — at a minimum — a great understanding of many disciplines and how they all intersect with each other, including immigration policy, infrastructure knowledge, economics, public policy, how entrepreneurs tick, labour certification and supply issues, provincial landlord and tenant legislation, taxation policy, etc., etc. If a single expert on housing exists, I’ve yet to meet them.

In a growing country such as Canada, housing availability has long been a problem. Accordingly, careful balancing and consideration of all the above issues is tricky for governments and requires informed and properly timed deployment of policy tools. Or, in some cases, just staying out of the way.

For example, last year the federal government announced that 405,000 immigrants came to Canada in 2021 — the most ever. It also announced plans to continue with such record increases by increasing yearly immigration numbers to 500,000 by 2025. With recently increased immigration numbers, one can logically ask where all the newcomers will be living? Is our infrastructure ready for such increased numbers? My two cents is that this country’s infrastructure — including housing — is not ready for such massive increases despite the overall importance of immigration.

From a tax perspective, the federal government’s approach to housing availability appears to be to attack bogeymen. First, it was all those evil non-residents/non-Canadian citizens who were supposedly causing the housing problems. Accordingly, the government in 2022 introduced the foreign homebuyer ban and then the underutilized housing tax, both of which