“We put an aggressive tax in place and said, ‘Look, if you’re a foreign buyer, you want to buy, you want to benefit from our public services, from our police services, from our schools, from our hospitals. You don’t get to just buy a property here and pay your income tax somewhere else and not support those services,’” he said, speaking at a news conference on a new liquid natural gas facility in northern B.C.
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Tom Davidoff, a professor in the University of B.C.’s Sauder School of Business, has written an upcoming article on the impact of foreign buyers on housing for the Canadian Tax Journal. He applauded B.C.’s decision to tax, rather than ban, foreign investment. The federal government’s ban is set to expire in 2027.
The paper notes that foreign buyers end up increasing prices in certain sub-markets when they have incentives to buy overseas. But once governments impose transaction fees or empty-housing taxes on those investments, purchases decline, prices come down and locals benefit from seeing more supply.