Anti-immigration and the politics of housing affordability: Examining the evolution and housing market impacts of Foreign Buyer Taxes in British Columbia and Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the evolution and impacts of Foreign Buyer Taxes (FBTs) in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada, introduced amid growing concerns over housing unaffordability. Drawing on media and policy discourses, I show how FBTs gained political traction through racialized narratives that narrowly framed foreign—especially Chinese—buyers as key culprits of unaffordability, deflecting attention from broader structural issues in the housing market that enabled speculation. This framing enabled governments to avoid more politically sensitive reforms implicating domestic investors and homeowners. Examining quantitative housing market data, I find that FBTs were associated with a decline in homeownership among immigrants without Canadian citizenship or permanent residency in affected regions, with no significant improvements in rental affordability. Altogether, the findings suggest that provincial governments may have adopted FBTs as a political expediency to signal government action on the housing crisis while sidestepping structural drivers of unaffordability in their housing markets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".