The View | What Singapore can teach Canada about curbing home prices without the xenophobia
- Political expediency and incomplete data have led to foreign buyers being targeted in Canada instead of those with multiple properties
- Rather than going by nationality, Canada should emulate Singapore and penalise speculative activity regardless of citizenship
At the time, the provincial government had barely begun to collect data on foreign ownership of real estate. What little information was available showed that foreigners accounted for just 5 per cent of transactions in Vancouver and the surrounding region.
Still, foreign purchases as a whole were tiny in relative terms, other domestic and external factors played important roles in driving up home values, and the extra tax contributed to a sharp fall in sales to foreigners in the ensuing months. Yet these facts rarely made the headlines.
A combination of mounting concerns over rapidly diminishing affordability, media-fuelled concern about foreign investors paying above the odds to park their money in a safe haven, and political expediency, made foreign buyers an easy scapegoat for the failures in Canada’s housing policy.