The Hongcouver | Chinese immigrant Joy Mo blames millionaire mainlanders for Vancouver’s housing woes
She cannot understand why Canadian politicians do not recognise a problem she says is plain to see. “I’m quite disappointed,” says the mother of two daughters, aged five and eight. “This is a place for all of us and if you drive all the local buyers out of the market, what is the community going to be?”
Mo, 42, was also born in mainland China, but tells me she does not want to be “painted with the same brush” as the extremely wealthy migrants she partly blames for her family’s housing situation. She and her Canadian husband have been renting in the satellite city of Port Moody since they sold their last home in 2008, unable to find a way back into the region’s sky-high market.
Mo, a court translator, says that while she wants a serious debate about the negative impact of foreign buyers in Vancouver, it is unfair to blame all Chinese migrants.
“Most immigrants who came here before 2008 or 2007 were mostly independent immigrants who came here with certain technical backgrounds. They tried to find a job, settle themselves here. But after that, all of a sudden, there are a whole bunch of investor-category immigrants,” Mo says. “Those are the ones that have a lot of money. They are generally not working and they don’t really care about finding a job because they have a business back in China.”
