CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: Two Pages Three Years

Port Auclair's council will vote next month on a rule that would permit short-term rentals only in a host's own home, and only for ninety nights a year; the bylaw runs to two pages. The argument around it has run for three years, and councillors have been handed two sets of averages and invited to choose between them.

Ileana Vukovic, a housing researcher at the Coastal Policy Institute, concedes the first number freely: listed properties account for barely three per cent of the city's homes. She then points out what that average hides. In the two harbour wards, closer to one dwelling in nine is advertised to visitors, and long-term vacancies there have been scarce for years, although she remains circumspect about the causal claim, since the listings may be a symptom of a tight market rather than its origin. What she rejects is the comfortable conclusion that removing them would change nothing at all.

Aarti Dhaliwal rents the upper suite of the house she has lived in since 1998. The income, she says, has covered her property taxes since she lost her job four years ago. She is not defending everyone. 'The people buying four flats and listing all of them are an impediment, and I would sign anything that stopped them,' she said. Her objection is to a rule that counts her single suite and an investor's building as the same thing; she concedes, on occasion, that the line she is drawing is hard to police.

Bruno Castellano, who runs walking tours from the harbour, bristles at the suggestion that visitors are simply a nuisance. He does not pretend the complaints about late-night arrivals are invented; several come from his own neighbours. What he doubts is that a night limit is the right instrument. The shops on his street survive on people who stay three days, he contends, and a ward emptied of visitors is not obviously a healthier place to live.

A resident-host and a four-flat investor can each exceed ninety nights, just as quiet and saturated wards can share one municipal average. Neither classification problem is resolved by the rule, which fixes its unit of measurement before establishing that the unit tracks the alleged harm.

As a former host, Dhaliwal's complaint about 6. Choose…one universal rulerising property taxesnoisy visiting guestsfalling tourist numbers lands with me. Port Auclair has required registration since 2019, yet two inspectors rarely enforce it. So councillors debating a ninety-night cap are 7. Choose…protecting long-term tenantswriting unenforceable rulesbanning every rentalanswering real pressure, not enforcing the ones they already have. 8. Choose…That saidBy the same tokenTo that extentOn that account, Vukovic's argument about concentration remains persuasive. On my block alone, four of the eleven houses are now listed year-round, far closer to her ward figure than to the citywide average. 9. Choose…Vukovic's ward evidenceCastellano's tourism casecouncil's draft ruleDhaliwal's single suite is the one I cannot follow: the visitors he counts arrive at houses that no longer hold neighbours for his shops to serve in winter. Register everyone, hire inspectors, then debate caps; until that happens, a new bylaw is 10. Choose…the obvious remedyan outright bana modest improvementjust more paperwork. Only after registrations, ward-level conversions and repeat ownership reveal whether harm comes from occasional resident hosts or portfolios behind nominally separate accounts would another universal threshold be evidentially defensible.