Inside the Industry Efforts to Amend the Foreign Buyer Ban

Mark Lewis comments in STOREYS on how the real estate industry worked to get the Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act (the foreign buyer ban) amended even before it came into effect on January 1, 2023.

""When the government published the regulations a couple of days before Christmas (to come into effect 10 days later), with terms that were not expected and which threatened a lot of commercial activity, that’s when everyone realized what a massively negative impact this was going to have on the ability to build new housing,” Mark Lewis tells STOREYS.

Lewis is a Partner at the Vancouver office of the Bennett Jones LLP law firm, Co-Head of the firm’s national Commercial Real Estate Group, and is also the Chair of the Urban Development Institute's (UDI) Legal Issues Committee in British Columbia. His practice is predominantly focused on the supply side of real estate and infrastructure development projects, where he often works with developers, lenders, and other project proponents.

“Our clients were not anticipating that the legislation was going to impact the supply side of the development equation; the government’s messaging when the Act was introduced was that it was to be focused only as a demand-side measure to reduce the competition for Canadians to buy residential property. As a result, the impact of this legislation was an immediate shock to the sector, in particular when the federal government published the regulations under the Act on December 21, 2022,” he says.

Lewis says that the federal government did a poor job of communicating and engaging with industry stakeholders, and that the development sector “took the government at its word” that the regulations would target demand and not supply.""

The full article is available here.