Vancouver is moving towards a vacant home tax to discourage foreigners from parking their cash in the city's real estate and then leaving the properties untended.
It's unlikely to be enough. China's millionaire population is doubling every few years, and will be larger than the entire population of Greater Vancouver within four years. The foreign influx could get much more intense.
So let's institute a freeze on the existing foreign-owned housing market. Houses owned by foreigners could continue to be owned by foreigners, and those houses would be "grandfathered" so that they could be sold on to other foreigners as well. But for all homes in Canadian hands, and all future homes, there would be a requirement that the buyer is a Canadian citizen.
In essence, this would create a separate housing market for the world's rich. Canadian cities could still continue to attract wealthy investors from around the world. Realtors would still make big commissions from sales to the jet-set crowd, and governments would still collect big land transfer taxes.
But the rest of us could buy homes in a saner housing market that hasn't been turned into a casino for the world's rich, or a place to hide wealth from the Chinese government.
A property tax surcharge for foreign buyers
Let's milk those rich Chinese nationals who are hiding income from their government by sinking it into Canadian real estate. They can obviously afford it, are unlikely to be deterred by a property tax hike, and could take the pressure off other taxpayers.
This is what Sydney, Australia, is planning to do. The city is facing a similar influx of foreign property buyers to what Vancouver is experiencing, and is planning to cool things off by raising property taxes for foreigners to four percentage points higher than what locals pay.