REAL ESTATE XENOPHOBIA

THERE’S A SPECTER supposedly haunting the globe’s expensive housing markets: the absentee foreign owner.

- CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI

Critics claim international interlopers are buying properties that should go to hardworking native homeowners instead of rootless global elites merely looking for investment opportunities.

That’s the story people are telling themselves, and it’s why politicians from Wellington to Winnipeg have banned home purchases by foreigners, as the Canadian government did in January 2023. That solution misconstrues the causes of high housing prices, which are largely due to regulations that restrict the supply.

Foreign buyers accounted for just 5 percent or so of the Canadian housing market before the ban. But Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government hopes that excluding them will bring down prices.

These foreigners, the government complains, are not using their homes the right way. “We will make sure that houses are being used as homes, rather than as commodities to be traded,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said when the ban was announced.