Greater Vancouver's real estate board says there were about 24-hundred home sales in the region last month.
It represents a 4.7 per cent decrease from the roughly 25-hundred sales recorded in March last year.
That came as the number of homes within the board's jurisdiction listed for sale rose 22.5 per cent year-over-year to more than 10-thousand-500.
That's 6.3 per cent above the 10-year seasonal average.
The Liberal government plans to create a new digital safety regulator to compel social-media platforms to take action against online harms and remove damaging content — including child sex-abuse material and intimate images shared without consent — under penalty of millions of dollars in fines. Justice Minister Arif Virani tabled the long-awaited Online Harms Act on Monday, along with a suite of other amendments to the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Policy watchers are split on the value of British Columbia's upcoming provincial flipping tax targeting those looking to make a quick buck in the real estate market. Brendon Ogmundson, chief economist of the British Columbia Real Estate Association, says the tax could end up reducing the overall number of homes on the market while only applying to a small number of properties.
Officers have found a stolen car used to flee a deadly hit-and-run following a high-speed police chase on the weekend, and they continue to search for a suspect. The Honda Civic was recovered early this morning outside Edmonton.
A 32-year-old man is accused of stabbing another man in a wheelchair in what Vancouver police say was an unprovoked attack. Police say the 34-year-old victim had been outside a shelter in the Downtown Eastside over the weekend when he was stabbed multiple times in the neck, sustaining non-life-threatening injuries.
Minimum-wage workers in British Columbia will get a pay hike of 65 cents an hour to $17.40 starting June 1, a move the government says will help lift more people out of poverty. The Ministry of Labour says in a statement the 3.9-per-cent increase is consistent with the province's average inflation rate last year.
The report makes more than two dozen recommendations, nine of them focused on raising family incomes through paying family-supporting wages or improving income supports. It says B.C.'s child poverty rate of 14.3 per cent was lower than the national average of 15.6 per cent, but the rate on 67 First Nations reserves is about double the national rate, while for single-parent families it's even higher at 40 per cent.