Foreign buyers Canada real estate

The federal government's budget will put $10 billion into breaking the back of unaffordable housing, Heather Scoffield writes.

The combination of higher interest rates, a slower economy and the big bundle of budget measures will no doubt take the edge off an overheated housing market. Legislation will be required for some of the measures. That will undoubtedly dampen demand for homes well before the federal plans for increasing supply kick in. The rules will also seek to ensure the true buyers are known and fully transparent, and not hiding behind a real estate agent or façade. On the affordable housing side of the equation, insiders feel they have already put a lot of money into that space, but there will be $1.5 billion for new affordable housing through the Rapid Housing Initiative that was inspired by the pandemic. The pandemic took that trend and set it on fire, with house prices climbing almost 30 per cent nationally in the past year alone.

The Canadian government is moving to make it illegal for foreigners to buy any residential properties in the country for the next two years, ...

Thursday's budget will include the speedier construction of residential properties, the construction of affordable housing units, as well as loans and funding for co-op housing. There is no cost attached to this foreign buyer measure yet. Permanent residents, foreign workers and students will be excluded from this new measure.

Housing affordability is going to be a main feature of tomorrow's federal budget, CTV News has learned, including moving to make it illegal for foreigners ...

Since abandoning their pledge years ago to not run deficits over $10 billion and return to balance by 2019, the Liberals have yet to present a budget that includes a path towards that goal. In their 2021 election platform, the Liberals vowed to slap a three per cent surtax on banks and insurers who earned more than $1 billion per year. Freeland’s second budget, and the first since the last federal election sent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau back to Ottawa with another minority government, has also had to factor in a series of considerations outside of what they campaigned on. One way CTV News has learned this will be done, is through a surtax on financial institutions that have made huge profits during the pandemic. The confidence-and-supply agreement included a pledge to move ahead with “launching a Housing Accelerator Fund.” The foreign buyers ban will apply to condos, apartments, and single residential units.