He keeps talking about Manitoba; Vancouver is not Manitoba. This is a completely broken, unhealthy, speculative market.

I don't believe it's possible for local incomes to support rents high enough to justify market construction of new rentals as an investment. And that's for a simple reason: property values are too high, driven by speculation, beyond the capacity of local incomes to support.

Under those conditions, allowing rents to rise rapidly does nothing more than short circuit a deranged speculative property to the lives of ordinary people working in the local economy. Leave them the fuck out of it. If you overpaid for your "investment" that's your problem.

High rent isn't going to lead to more "supply" under these conditions. The only thing that'll fix the rental market is to break the addiction to a speculative property market. There's no shortcut to getting clean.