Really? Really? So if you bought a shack in Vancouver twenty years ago for a song and now it's worth the entire symphony orchestra you can sell it with no taxes?

No wonder prices up there have gone bonkers even by US standards.

Yeah 0. None other than land transfer tax which is very little. And if anybody suggested putting in a sane G7 standard tax policy around this, the baby boomers would come rip their head off and parade it around on a pitchfork.

Non-primary residence of course gets fully taxed.

It's ... actually a reasonable policy, in some way. It can be quite annoying in the USA when you (if single) have more capital gains than you get "for free" ($250k which sounds like a lot, but if you bought in CA 20 years ago and are now moving, that can get eaten up quickly - a $300k house in 2004 would be almost $500k today from inflation alone) you pay tax.

Then if the house you bought with the proceeds drops in value and you have to sell, you can't claim a deduction for the capital loss.

Of course all capital gains taxes whatsoever have the hidden inflation problem, where you get taxed on the inflation caused by ...

In my opinion all these policies which encourage housing inflation are just the result of western neo-liberal economies trying to cover over their abdication of reasonable retirement/pension policies.

Trudeau was on record a couple weeks ago basically saying "we can't let housing prices fall. if housing prices fall, people won't be able to retire" which is a fucked up admission that there's no way to "retire" without passing debt onto the next generation.

It's not going to end well. It either falls apart in crisis / housing bubble pop, or we end up with some kind of neo-feudalist future slowly developing over the next 100-200 years.