A problem that bothers me is high prices of real-estate on the west-coast of Canada due to money laundering, tax avoidance, and governmental complacency. How can I address this using tech?
If you have a hammer and can't find any nails, looking around for other things to hit is unlikely to be a productive activity.
You've identified a serious, complex issue and you care about improving the situation. That's an excellent beginning. Go to your local library and find a book on systems thinking/analysis such as Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Start to understand how all the pieces fit together and what sort of changes will help and what will make the problem worse (you will be surprised!). Your tech experience will be extremely helpful here.
That course looks great. Keep in mind that you are unlikely to "learn" anything "new". It's a process; do this, do that. Put some effort here, think about that stuff there. And then you start to see interactions and cause/effect patterns that you didn't see before as well as behaviors that work completely differently than you previously believed.
To solve problems effectively, you shouldn't try and preconceive the solution. If you really want to solve the problem, you'll need to immerse yourself in the problem and field and figure out what are some causes of the problem that you can affect.
You've distilled the problem down to "money laundering, tax avoidance, and governmental complacency" but do other issues like zoning, foreign investment, lack of suitable space, etc contribute?
While it's possible to solve problems in fields that you don't work in, it's less common. If you want to affect real-estate prices on the West coast of Canada, you should dive into the real estate industry and most likely some obvious inefficiencies will pop out that can be solved.