It is VERY STRANGE that the columnist asks a key question, but then somehow does not answer it, about super-high house prices in the west side of Vancouver.

He asks this: "How did it get this way?"

Why did he not answer his own question in his column?

Well, here is the answer: Starting around the mid-1980s, government in Canada decided to vacuum up millionaires en masse from overseas, through massive investor immigrant programs, first a federal one and then a Quebec one.

The result was that billions of dollars of money flooded into the west side of Vancouver, first mainly from Hong Kong, and then mainly from mainland China.

That is how house prices in the west side of Vancouver got skyrocketed to dozens of times the average annual local income.

Why did the columnist not answer his own question himself?