Thank you, Mr. Chair. Respectfully, we looked at this a couple of years ago when it was being proposed, essentially, as a land transfer tax, and it was at the time proposed that it could possibly bring in somewhere in the neighbourhood of about $3.1 million. I think we understood at that time that about 70 percent of that would have been coming from the Yellowknife market. I appreciate that there are certainly other market communities that are going to be affected by this, but I am a little bit troubled that we are using a phased-in approach. I mean, I don't understand why the department would just have gone to increase the fee to the extent that they thought it was necessary right out of the gate. If you buy a house, you buy a house every five, maybe 10 years. You're not buying a house every single year, so it is not as though there is going to be a shock factor. People are going to buy a house maybe this year. You won't see them buy one for another 10 years. Whether you put the all-in $500,000 now or not doesn't really matter.
The bigger concern is that this type of administration is something that we expect as taxpayers and as residents to be paid through general taxation and payroll-type taxes. When we start picking off little areas of administration where we think we need to add additional fees, then that's when people start to get upset.
Sin taxes and the like are a little bit different because there are often reasons behind those for wanting to change society's behaviour on a particular, usually problematic, or some kind of instance where we need to change society's behaviour so that we can reduce harm to society. In this case, this is housing. You continue to say that we advocate for affordable housing, and we have to undertake initiatives to find ways to make it cheaper to have families buy and reside in homes, and yet here we are again, going to find a way to increase the costs of acquiring housing.
I am still not convinced that this isn't anything more than the government's original plan as it related to gaining their costs and revenue difference to get to the $150 million mark from the onset of this government. I think that, because there was clearly not any public acceptance to the original land transfer tax that would have resulted in $3.1 million a year being generated, this now has been the approach in which we're going to deal with this.
I think that the constituents I represent will have a difficulty with this. They certainly will be letting me know about the increase to the cost of living when I start knocking on their doors in a few weeks.
Unfortunately, Mr. Chair, I can't find myself supporting this particular clause at this point in time. Thank you.