Does allowing foreign investors and corporations to buy one of Canada’s most important assets, our homes, move us closer to protecting Canada’s economic sovereignty? Or does it make Canadian families more vulnerable and dependent on foreign entities for shelter?
The answer is obvious: the latter, which is what I find most puzzling about the Carney government’s decision to allow foreign investors to buy up Canada’s new homes while also arguing that its budget is about Canada’s sovereignty.
When the Trudeau government introduced the foreign buyer ban in 2022, its reasoning was straightforward: ensuring housing remains affordable and “is owned by Canadians”.
Budget 2026 extends that ban on foreign purchases of existing homes by two years, to January 1, 2029, but it adds a new exemption: foreign buyers will now be allowed to purchase newly built homes.
Ottawa’s rationale, in the budget’s own words, is that the change “would help protect housing affordability by keeping the vast majority of the market available for Canadians, while unlocking additional investment in new housing supply.”
Allowing foreigners to buy Canada’s homes, whether existing or new, increases the demand for houses and drives home prices higher. This is basic supply and demand.
And yet, policymakers and economists are suddenly arguing that opening up our new homes to foreign investors isn’t a demand-side lever but a supply-side one. But the argument doesn’t hold up, and the generation most affected by this decision deserves better.
Why does Canada suddenly need foreign companies to buy up our new homes to increase our housing supply? Because new home prices are unaffordable for Canadian households.
Rather than doing anything that makes owning a home more affordable, the Carney government has decided to take a shortcut to building more homes - just sell them to foreign entities who are willing to pay more than a Canadian household can.
That’s what this is about.
The government’s own reasoning gives this away. Ottawa says that keeping foreign buyers out of the resale market keeps resale homes affordable for Canadians, and it’s right. But the same argument applies to new homes: keeping foreign buyers out of the new home market would make new homes more affordable too. They can’t have it both ways. Either foreign demand drives up home prices or it doesn’t.
While BC and Ontario already tax foreign buyers, the next step, of course, will be for them to carve out a similar exception that lets foreign companies buy our new homes.
This plan is not about making homeownership more affordable for Canadians.
It’s about driving up the price of new homes by finding someone who will pay more than Canadian families can afford. It shuts the next generation out of homeownership by forcing them to rent from a foreign investor.
A budget that claims to be about Canada’s economic sovereignty should not begin by handing the next generation’s homes to foreign investors. Sovereignty starts with Canadians owning the homes they live in.
