The rise of Housing Nationalism in Canada and transnational property ownership patterns

ABSTRACT

We consider how housing acts as a potential realm where perception of crisis can activate reactionary nationalism, investigating how it differs from and interacts with other realms (e.g. jobs and wages, crime, and social welfare). We argue that housing produces distinct triggers for reactionary responses, and potentially results in different media framing, politics, and policy trajectories. We detail the rise of Housing Nationalism in Canada, following its spread from British Columbia, where we find that flexible framing of foreign threat often borrowed from other realms. By contrast, pinning Housing Nationalism to policy generally required more tractable definitions of foreignness, tied to surveillance and the application of penalties. We examine the roll out of policy responses associated with Housing Nationalism and lay out potential harms in terms of challenges to liberal ideals, including Canadian multinationalism, immigrant incorporation, and transnational ties. Finally we provide a baseline of Canadian transnational property ownership patterns, demonstrating that within the provinces where Housing Nationalism became most dominant, Canadian residents generally own far more properties abroad than the number of properties owned in Canada by residents elsewhere. Overall, the Canadian case demonstrates the utility of considering housing as a distinct realm motivating the rise of reactionary nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• immigration
• Canada
• policy
• nationalism

View correction statement:

Correction

Disclosure statement

Nathanael Lauster - As a faculty member at a public institution, Professor Nathanael Lauster (NL) has offered expert advice in multiple capacities, including in both unpaid and paid forms of service for several governments. These include the City of Vancouver (Empty Homes Tax Expert Advisory Panel and Making Room Expert Advisory Panel); the Province of British Columbia (modelling results for changes to zoning regulations); and the Government of Canada (providing external expert advice to the Canada-British Columbia Expert Panel on the Future of Housing Supply and Affordability and peer review for a report they authored). NL has also provided peer review for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), a Crown Corporation, including for their report “Examining Escalating House Prices in Large Canadian Metropolitan Centres.” The CMHC has also provided grant funding for Professor Lauster's research into zoning. NL has also provided expert witness service in several court cases in both the USA and Canada involving claims of housing discrimination. These include the Li vs. British Columbia BCSC 1819 case concerning the Foreign Buyer Tax in British Columbia, as decided in 2019, where NL was hired for the service by plaintiff, but with duty to the Court. NL declares no monetary support from any source for the present publication.

Jens von Bergmann - Dr. Jens von Bergmann (JvB) is the founder and president of MountainMath, a data analytics firm specializing in demographics, housing, and transportation in Canada. In this capacity JvB has provided housing-related data analytics, econometric and demographic modelling, and policy scenario modelling to all levels of government, including at the federal level for CMHC, for two provincial governments, and multiple municipal governments and municipal government organizations. JvB has served as an expert witness in the Li vs. British Columbia BCSC 1819 case concerning the Foreign Buyer Tax in British Columbia, as decided in 2019, where he was hired for the service by plaintiff, but with duty to the Court. JvB has provided housing-related services to private entities, including building data pipelines and data cleaning to aid economic analysis and to provide open data for the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, and tools to acquire and analyze rental data for planning and analytics companies. JvB is the author of several housing-related and housing-adjacent statistical packages and has given paid and pro bono workshops on working with these packages and analyzing housing data, including to CMHC, the Canadian Association of Business Economists, and at several Canadian research institutions. JvB has regularly supported housing related initiatives on an unpaid basis, including co-writing three appendices to the Expert Panel on the Future of Housing Supply and Affordability, serving various advisory roles at all levels of government as well as non-profit and industry entities. JvB declares no monetary support from any source for the present publication.

Data availability statement

Text and source code for data analysis for this paper are available via GitHub at: https://github.com/mountainMath/housing_nationalism_codebase.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2353401)

Notes

1 On top of the base property transfer tax of 1% on the first $200,000, 2% on the balance up to $2,000,000, and 3% on the remainder of the property value. There are several exemptions available for first-time buyers as well as on the purchase of newly built properties. In 2021 the BC NDP added another bracket taxing 5% on the value over $3,000,000.

2 Capital gains exemptions on sale of primary residence in Canada are estimated at a cost of $7.52 billion in national income revenue for the year of 2017 (MacPhail et al. 2021).