Enough of Teresa Wat—let's talk about David Eby's damaging narrative
Enough of Teresa Wat—let's talk about David Eby's damaging narrative
Richmond-Bridgeport independent candidate Charlie Smith says that he will speak out if any politician blames people of Chinese ancestry for high housing prices
In a couple of recent posts, I’ve highlighted why I’m running as an independent against Conservative incumbent Teresa Wat in Richmond-Bridgeport. Simply put, I feel that the B.C. Conservatives are too extreme and too hostile to peer-reviewed scientific research to warrant anyone’s support. I hope voters reject Wat’s decision to abandon the more reasonable B.C. United caucus in favour of a hard right alternative.
Now, it’s time to talk about B.C. NDP Leader David Eby. There are many reasons why I’m uncomfortable voting for his party with him at the helm. I’m running in Richmond-Bridgeport in part because it has a large number of immigrants of Chinese ancestry. Also, this constituency includes the River Rock Casino, which played a pivotal role in Eby’s political rise to the top of the B.C. NDP.
In the lead-up to the 2017 election and in the immediate aftermath, I didn’t like how Eby mostly pinned the blame for rising housing prices on “foreign money” and money launderers. It troubled me that he supplied a housing researcher with data on a small group of homeowners on the West Side of Vancouver with non-anglicized Chinese names. This researcher, Andy Yan, released his “study” to the media in 2015, which contributed to a racial bonfire.
Back in those days, I sent a message to Eby stating that he wouldn’t arrange for a survey on non-anglicized names of homeowners in Harry Bains’s constituency of Surrey-Newton.
It was obvious to anyone paying serious attention that foreign investors were not the primary factor driving up housing costs in B.C. In fact, “foreign money” is a nasty way of conflating direct foreign investment from outside of the country with housing purchases by landed immigrants, who are invited into Canada and pay taxes here.
Here is the combination of factors that really drove up housing prices: sustained low interest rates, the rate of millennial household formation, quantitative easing, intergenerational wealth transfers, a well-heeled domestic class of home-hoarding investors, and a supply shortage.
The supply shortage was largely caused by municipal zoning, permitting delays, and too few construction workers. A contributing factor behind the labour shortage is various provincial governments not doing enough to educate young people in the trades, particularly outside of Metro Vancouver.
In recent years, the entry of hedge funds, along with the long-standing Real Estate Investment Trusts, are contributing to more demand and rising prices.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation recognized that foreign investors weren’t the primary drivers of high housing prices after the 2017 election. But these other factors weren’t nearly as sexy to the media.
In the video below, former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan highlights this issue.
Foreign narrative could be monetized
Here’s the ugly reality, folks. The media focused on foreign buying and money laundering because it attracted eyeballs to websites. This web traffic could be monetized through programmatic advertising revenue.
For example, if Douglas Todd writes about Chinese people driving up housing prices—rather than focusing on religion as he did in the past—much more revenue will come to the Vancouver Sun. The bosses at Postmedia will be happy.
In a similar vein, Sam Cooper became a hot commodity to the Vancouver Sun and later Global News because he, too, could deliver page views. Cooper accomplished this with racially charged “exclusives” reliant on unnamed sources.
Talk show hosts repeatedly invited Cooper on as a guest because audiences loved hearing his sensational yarns. He is good for ratings. The Jack Webster Foundation honoured Cooper with one of its highest honours. Nobody ever asked why many of his stories couldn’t be independently verified.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a money-laundering problem. It’s just that Eby’s narrative reeked of hyperbole.
Eby persisted with his crusade against money launderers after the 2017 election, linking them to a toxic stew of high housing prices, toxic-drug deaths, and illicit cash running through the River Rock Casino. He pushed for a provincial inquiry, which ended up costing taxpayers $18.6 million. That would pay for a lot of schoolteachers.
In fact, the former B.C. Liberal government had largely cleaned up the money-laundering problem in casinos by 2015. Yet Eby continued with his showboating. By the time the inquiry actually rolled around years later, Canada was moving ever closer to a cashless society.
Prior to the government calling an inquiry, Eby retained a former senior RCMP officer, Peter German, as an advisor. He was commissioned to write reports focusing on money laundering in areas that the public associated with Chinese people: casinos, luxury cars, and horse racing. German was not commissioned to write reports on money laundered through the cannabis trade or securities markets, which are the preferred vehicles of many white organized criminals.
Real-estate, legal, and money-laundering experts were commissioned to write a report about money-laundering in the housing sector. Even though this report noted that the greatest share of money laundering was from the United States, the overall effect of Eby’s initiatives was to stigmatize the largely law-abiding community of immigrants from the People’s Republic of China. Eby also amplified the “research” of Cooper on several occasions, building up his profile.
I’ve been amused to see Cooper turning on Eby in recent years, almost like a journalistic incarnation of Frankenstein’s monster. Eby also appeared in public with Cooper’s friend, short seller Marc Cahodes, who repeatedly warned of a housing-price collapse that never truly materialized.
Why didn’t prices fall with demand-side measures?
If money laundering had, in fact, been the primary factor driving up housing prices, one would expect these prices to fall once this problem was addressed. Yet in spite of all of the B.C. NDP’s demand-side efforts to solve the housing crisis and a public inquiry, prices kept rising.
Moreover, the commissioner of the inquiry determined that money laundering was not the cause of housing unaffordability. Eventually, Eby threw in the towel and conceded that the province had to get on with increasing the supply.
A journalist whom I respect, the now-retired Ian Mulgrew, summed up the findings of the Eby-driven public inquiry in a column last year.
“Premier David Eby obviously believes he can brazen out the collapse of his decade-long crusade against money laundering,” Mulgrew declared.
“An expensive public inquiry that made some lawyers millionaires found nothing. Zip,” the veteran scribe added. “Two costly and lengthy RCMP investigations with code names — E-Pirate and E-National — uncovered nada. OK, maybe a bylaw infraction — operating without a business licence.”
Then Mulgrew offered up this comment about Eby: “On money laundering his entire thesis, however, has turned out to be threadbare.”
My friend Ng Weng Hoong has repeatedly exposed Eby’s questionable tactics in whipping up public ire over money laundering and real estate. I’ll provide just two examples here and here. Weng also wrote a blistering review of Sam Cooper’s book.
When Weng was taking enormous risks to do this important work on behalf of people of Chinese ancestry and the broader community, he received very little support, let alone encouragement, from B.C.’s political and journalistic elites. They thought he was a pest for using Twitter to shame those who peddled the foreign-money narrative.
Weng has a non-anglicized Chinese name, which he has kept for more than two decades in Canada. He’s far from the only one. One of B.C.’s most esteemed Chinese Canadians, Tung Chan, also kept his non-anglicized Chinese name.
Yet David Eby tried to make an issue of non-anglicized Chinese names, as if there’s something noteworthy about this. When the media furor reached a crescendo in 2015, 2016, and 2017, the B.C. cabinet minister with the biggest platform in the Chinese-speaking community, Teresa Wat, did not rally her constituents in opposition to what was taking place.
That only occurred years later from within the community. By then, Eby had expressed regret about using the non-anglicized nomenclature as a sociological marker. Sorry, Mr. Premier, the damage was already done by that point.
If I’m elected as the independent MLA for Richmond-Bridgeport and if Eby or any other politician tries to pull a stunt like this again, voters can count on me to raise my voice in the B.C. legislature.
Many people who’ve immigrated from the People’s Republic of China to Canada have, essentially, voted with their feet. They don’t want to live under a dictatorship, just as most of the immigrants from Iran don’t want to live under a brutal theocratic regime.
Like some from Iran, lots of Chinese newcomers don’t want to state this publicly for fear of jeopardizing family members still in the country where they were born. It doesn’t mean that they’re linked to the United Front Work Department, just as those Iranian immigrants who keep their mouths shut aren’t necessarily members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. If Eby really wants to show leadership, he will articulate this publicly to help them feel more welcome in British Columbia.