I think this is confusion of two pretty distinct things, I'm fine with affluence being a metric in the immigration process (especially if, as with Canada, the government directly profits from the temporary use of that money) - the issue in Vancouver more lies in the usage of vacant properties to park money from overseas, since cities suffer from having artificially lowered vacancies it is pretty proper that a vacancy tax is leveraged on these properties to recoup the lost value - the issue here is mostly that the prior Premier worked to block such a tax repeatedly, we now have the tax in place though it's implementation is still having some growing pains.

Thus we're getting some utility out of recouping lost value from the tax, but the disincentive the tax would have represented has come in too late to avoid the huge property value spike, ideally we'll see those inflated values decrease somewhat as real estate as a savings account becomes less attractive and starts depreciating the parked value quicker.

There is also the issue that it's hard to audit residency currently.