This paper examines the evolution and impacts of Foreign Buyer Taxes (FBTs) in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada, introduced amid growing concerns over housing unaffordability.
Although initially introduced in Singapore and Hong Kong, these restrictions gained popularity in Anglosphere countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where governments mainly imposed additional taxes on property acquisitions by foreign entities.
Drawing on media and policy discourses, I show how FBTs gained political traction through racialized narratives that narrowly framed foreign—especially Chinese—buyers as key culprits of unaffordability, deflecting attention from broader structural issues in the housing market that enabled speculation. This framing enabled governments to avoid more politically sensitive reforms implicating domestic investors and homeowners. Examining quantitative housing market data, I find that FBTs were associated with a decline in homeownership among immigrants without Canadian citizenship or permanent residency in affected regions, with no significant improvements in rental affordability.
Altogether, the findings suggest that provincial governments may have adopted FBTs as a political expediency to signal government action on the housing crisis while sidestepping structural drivers of unaffordability in their housing markets.
