Rime posted:

It's a failure of basic education that people don't realize they are not insuring their vehicles replacement value, that ICBC could give two shits about paying you out for your car: insurance is about covering your rear end against possibly maiming / killing someone for life.

IMO $1600 a year is considerably better than "Surprise, fuckface, you're getting sued for $2m because you broke that cyclists back", but we live in a society where apparently everything should be free regardless of the hidden costs so .

Health Services posted:

OSFI continues to hope that financial institutions will meet the heavy burden and onerous requirement of verifying borrowers' incomes before giving them lots of money, and tying their shoes before running to catch the bus.

Actual quote from the Superintendent: "We recognize that gathering income and employment information for some borrowers can be challenging. For example, it can be difficult to have a high level of assurance for borrowers who are self-employed or who rely on income from sources outside of Canada. Even in these more challenging cases, we are still looking for rigorous yet reasonable efforts to verify income and employment."

It's not really reassuring that OSFI has to repeatedly FIs that they really shouldn't run while carrying scissors.

Health Services posted:

OSFI continues to hope that financial institutions will meet the heavy burden and onerous requirement of verifying borrowers' incomes before giving them lots of money, and tying their shoes before running to catch the bus.

Actual quote from the Superintendent: "We recognize that gathering income and employment information for some borrowers can be challenging. For example, it can be difficult to have a high level of assurance for borrowers who are self-employed or who rely on income from sources outside of Canada. Even in these more challenging cases, we are still looking for rigorous yet reasonable efforts to verify income and employment."

It's not really reassuring that OSFI has to repeatedly FIs that they really shouldn't run while carrying scissors.

namaste faggots posted:

https://twitter.com/jhwfung/status/802940198786957312

I don't really know how to post tweetstorms but read all 30+ of Justin's tweets. Frances Bula is a piece of poo poo journalist in the fine tradition of assholes like Amanda Lang and and loving Evan Salomon.

The point is, real estate shitheads are hard at work trying to manipulate media into sympathizing with supply siders and fuerdai.

quote:

Immigration mega-fraud: the rich Chinese immigrants to Canada who don’t really want to live there

The case of Xun “Sunny” Wang, a Vancouver-area consultant jailed for masterminding the biggest immigration fraud in Canadian history, is startling in scope.

Wang, 46, who was sentenced on October 23 to seven years in prison, conducted his fraud on an almost industrial scale, as he helped rich Chinese clients maintain Canadian permanent-resident status and later obtain citizenship.

Chinese passports both real and fake were shipped in bulk to the mainland, where professional forgers would doctor them to make it look like their owners had been present in Canada when they had actually been in China. Wang would set up his clients in fake jobs at his firms, printing business cards for them and issuing pay slips - adding insult to injury, their fake salaries were so low his wealthy clients were able to file tax returns that allowed them to claim from Canadian coffers tax benefits intended for the working poor.

Adding insult to injury, their fake salaries were so low his wealthy clients were able to claim from Canadian coffers tax benefits intended for the working poor

Letters from schools and lawyers were also forged, as well as lease agreements. Fake mailing addresses and phone numbers were set up.

From 2006 until his arrest in 2014, Wang and his employees at his unlicenced New Can and Wellong immigration consultancies in Richmond are known to have helped 1,200 clients cheat immigration rules. In all, they paid Wang C$10 million (HK$59 million) for his illegal services, the Provincial Court of British Columbia found.

Yet the most significant aspect of Wang’s case is neither the scale of his operation, nor its sophistication and audacity.

It is the motivation of his clients.

Immigration fraud as the public typically understands it involves various schemes to allow unqualified people to live and work in Canada.

Yet, bizarrely, Wang’s case involved clients willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to AVOID living in Canada when they were perfectly entitled to do so, having already obtained permanent resident status.

An example of the forgery employed by Xun Wang. The addition of fake Chinese entry and exit stamps in a passport helped create the illusion that a single long stay in China was two short ones, bolstering the owner’s claim to have been residing in Canada. Photo: The Province / CBSA

Understanding their motivation is key to understanding how Wang found such a steady stream of customers.

Wang’s clients wanted to be able to maintain their PR status without actually living in the Great White North, since their jobs and businesses were back in China. And by faking their presence in Canada they would eventually be able to claim Canadian citizenship, with all the privileges it confers, including the right to live in Canada – eventually.

That anyone should immigrate to Canada while regarding living there as a burdensome task to be endured or avoided might sound weird, but the concept is so common among some Chinese immigrant circles that there is a word for it: yiminjian, or “immigration jail”. The term refers to the period of compulsory Canadian residency (now, four years out of the previous six) which one must suffer before applying for citizenship. Think of a Canadian passport as the get-out-of-jail card.

It needs to be emphasised that this mindset does not apply to all Chinese immigrants - only that subset for whom greater opportunities exist back in China (and only a subset of those). The problem in this instance isn't about nationality or ethnicity - it's about wealth and the commodification of immigration status.

The case against Wang did not state the specific programmes under which his clients arrived in Canada, but they were described as “wealthy” and “well-to-do” by prosecutors. A long-time Canadian immigration industry source with decades of involvement in Chinese immigration said “the biggest single category would clearly be the investor-class [husbands]”.

He was referring to the now-defunct Immigrant Investor Programme and the still-operational Quebec Immigrant Investor Programme. These schemes effectively put Canadian PR status up for sale, to anyone worth C$1.6 million and willing to hand over an C$800,000 “investment”, for a period of five years.

The source said he wasn’t surprised by Wang’s case “although the scale of this was rather impressive”.

Such newcomers are often criticised for treating citizenship as a business proposition – after it has been presented to them as such

David Mulroney, former Canadian ambassador to China

However, he said the case illustrated the inherent difficulty in policing programmes which encourage PR status and citizenship to be viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold, and that for some rich immigrants, what he called “the bigger fraud” begins from the moment that they falsely undertake to live in Canada.

“It illustrates the fact that many of these economic immigrants got their status through immigration fraud ab initio, from beginning to end,” he said. “But this bigger fraud is not so easy to prove…it comes down to the question of intent. There are no documents [that can prove it]. But after 20 years of China being the main source of business immigrants, you’d think that the politicians would have noticed that the vast majority of these astronaut dads do not in fact reside in Canada. Most never had any intention of doing so. The goal is to get the wife and kids here.”

Overcoming this mindset would be difficult he said. He suggested that one way might be that “if immigrants are [supposedly] going to Quebec, give them a conditional visa ‘[to] demonstrate to us that you have resided here in Quebec for the past five years, then you’ll get unconditional permanent resident status’.”

Canada’s former ambassador to China, David Mulroney, in his recently published book on Canada-China relations, pointed out that the problem of investor immigrants heading back to China to earn their livelihoods was one of Canada’s making. “Such newcomers are often criticised for treating citizenship as a business proposition – after it has been presented to them as such,” he writes in Middle Power, Middle Kingdom.

“We’ve been relying on the dubious notion that an applicant’s net worth is one of the most reliable indicators when it comes to predicting the likelihood of a happy and successful transition to Canadian life. What does this say about us to people who are considering moving here?” Mulroney says.

“It certainly fails to give pride of place to the qualities and values that have always attracted people to Canada.”

The fallout from Wang’s fraud continues. Seven of his former employees have been charged; two are fugitives while five were due in court this month.

As for the fate of Wang’s 1,200 clients, Judge Reg Harris ominously warned in sentencing: “I expect the immigration authorities will have to review the circumstances of all those concerned and it is quite likely that some persons will be removed from Canada.”

Rime posted:

Double posting because it's been a long week and IDGAF.

Here is a fancy new tower somewhere in the lower mainland. Largely bachelors and one-bedrooms, occupancy was supposed to have been three months ago but the concrete was hosed. Lets take a look inside:



The ikea cabinets rather than in-wall storage were not included in the square footage calculations pre-sale. They don't show up on the floorplans.



Which I guess sucks when your bedroom loses a shitton of space for two cabinets, and they have that awesome uncleanable gap at the top which is too small for storage but great for spiders to build houses in.



Hope you didn't want to bake cookies, or chicken, or anything really. The fuckin' 28' yacht I looked at last week had a larger oven.



To the left we have a lovely cabinet setup with a built-in mount for a TV. But wait, the wall to the right has the only door to the bedroom, and the living room is so narrow that your couch would be two feet away from the TV if you had it away from the door! Let's also put two baseboard heaters kitty-corner beside each other, but none in the kitchen or entryway, that corner can heat the entire living space despite being beside the patio doors.

At least they recognized there's less floor space than a dorm room in here and threw the owners a bone with the built-in desk unit. You can't see it in the pictures, but there's no power outlet underneath it so it's more of a last great gently caress you really.

This has been your tour through a new-build condo, starting at just $469,000.

Terebus posted:

Can you link the floorplan?

The Butcher posted:

Hell yeah. I don't have to fire up the baseboard heaters until it drops below zero thanks to all the ambient heat. Currently sitting at a comfy 20c inside, 7c outside.

Wood building though. Do you get the same effect in concrete ones? Not sure if they would insulate better or the concrete would soak up and retain the heat...

less than three posted:

lol have fun walking to your patio, and apparently not having the couch face the TV. Or hitting the stove with your dining chair.

less than three posted:

lol have fun walking to your patio, and apparently not having the couch face the TV. Or hitting the stove with your dining chair.

JawKnee posted:

does the sq footage include the balcony at more than half the size of the bedroom? Because if so.

Terebus posted:

Haha that's a really dumb floorplan but that doesn't look the same. The picture with the big rear end wardrobe by the bathroom doesn't have an exit door behind it.

Rime posted:

Seen at Columbia today: "Hotel inspired living at blah blah blah my Amicon".

EvilJoven posted:

I've been in quite a few hotels, some of them quite nice.

Who the gently caress wants to live in one?

EvilJoven posted:

I've been in quite a few hotels, some of them quite nice.

Who the gently caress wants to live in one?

Mr.Shadow posted:

It's hilarious how 1 bedroom+den are now relabelled 2 bedrooms with little change in the square footage, while getting a massive mark up of course.

UnfortunateSexFart posted:

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

I'm the two bathrooms that are exactly the same, even though one is called an ensuite.

UnfortunateSexFart posted:

I liked this one from THE CITY OF LOUGHEED (aka lovely traffic-snarled suburbs)



Is your kid is getting too old to share your one bedroom apartment, but you don't want to move to Surrey? Buy a luxury suite at THE CITY OF LOUGHEED, where he can get his own windowless jail cell for only $800 per square foot.

Rime posted:

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=49.27977,-123.12266,12.289,latLng&t=3.24

Watch a wave of shitbox houses take over the richest farmland in all of Canada in less than 25 years.

PT6A posted:

No one, not even travellers; hence the popularity of AirBnB. Hotels loving suck, the only nice thing about them is someone comes by once a day to tidy up for you.

blah_blah posted:

Try staying at the Four Seasons instead of the Holiday Inn.

EvilJoven posted:

Look at the edge of any populated area along a freeway in the GTA. Ugh.

EDIT: haha no wonder people bitch about Kenaston in Winnipeg. It's like watching a rash spreading.

Lexicon posted:

Meh, I'm with him. I've stayed in tons of nice hotels and it's the same mediocrity delivered in a shinier exterior. A quality Airbnb is a way nicer experience.