Foreign-Buyers Tax Now Mainstream in Canada

When Canadians last went to the polls in 2015 you would have had to scour the country to find someone willing to talk about a surtax on foreign nationals buying real estate.

Now, such taxes are just considered the right thing to do. And B.C. has shown the way.
Ignited by the public’s anger over the housing affordability crisis, the B.C. Liberals surprised everyone in 2016 by going against their own free-market ideology by quickly imposing a 15-per-cent tax on foreign purchasers of housing in Metro Vancouver.

Reactions were immediate. Property developers and their lobbyists, plus some activists and a handful of academics, claimed a foreign-buyers tax was xenophobic and even racist.

However, the foreign-buyers tax took some fuel out of Vancouver’s stratospheric housing prices and had some impact on housing prices in Victoria. And after the B.C. NDP narrowly won office in 2017, it hiked the surtax to 20 per cent and expanded it to Victoria and other cities.

Now there is talk of imposing taxes or even outright bans on a Federal level. What will happen next?