Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
was incorporated (Ley 1995). Clearly there was need to respond with some
haste to public unrest that threatened to erect barriers and shut open bor-
ders. Findings were released at a breakfast meeting of invited political and
business leaders; a press release promised a second round of results at
another breakfast meeting a month later. In this series of reports investment
capital from outside Canada was absolved as a special factor in the intense
activity in the regional housing market. Instead 'everyone' was implicated
especially middle-aged baby boomers.
31
The perturbations in the market
were normalized and thus defused politically as they were attributed to pre-
dictable national demographic trends and projections. Everything was as it
should be. A later report extended some culpability to local government
for its development fees, an irritant to free market analysis and practice.
But as a contributor to price inflation this was a banal suggestion for the
fees in different municipalities ranged from $1500 to a high of $12,000 in
one jurisdiction; even the maximum fee would have amounted to less than
3 percent of the cost of a new house.
Within the real estate industry itself the Laurier reports lacked credibility.
Laughter greeted the presentation of one report to an audience of realtors,
while a prominent realtor dismissed a second report as 'naïve' (Pettit 1992:
142, and personal communication). Nonetheless the reports did significant
ideological work. Referring to the Laurier reports, Goldberg (1991) wrote in
a popular magazine, 'certain neighbourhoods have received the bulk of
recent immigrants as well as Asian investment. There is no verifiable evi-
dence, however, to show that this action has had any systematic effect on
house prices'.
32
Laurier press releases were widely reported by local and
national media. Under the by-line, 'Blame boomers for boom', Vancouver's
Real Estate Weekly
(1989) repeated the Laurier announcement to refute
'complaints that high immigration to Greater Vancouver was the root cause
of soaring home prices'.
33
Some years later at a workshop on media report-
ing in Vancouver, a television news anchorman acknowledged that the
Laurier studies and their coverage had transformed the editorial position of
his newsroom in reporting stories on immigration and the property market:
In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a lot of concern about immigra-
tion and its effects. Our news perpetuated this perception. The Laurier
Institution quickly found out that house price increases have far more to do
with interprovincial migrants than with immigration.
Those are the facts
and we
revised our coverage in short order.
34
Though the 'facts' lie elsewhere, Laurier had been successful in the battle
for appearances. Despite the existence of a contradictory negative relation-
ship between domestic migration and house prices through the 1977-2002
period, the myth of domestic, that is a made-in-Canada, source for the
