Article content continued

December 2017 brought the first release from the Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP), an initiative supported by both Statistics Canada and the CMHC. While that release made international headlines and was hailed as the most comprehensive study to date on foreign ownership of Canadian real estate, the director of the new StatsCan division overseeing the CHSP told The Vancouver Sun at the time that it represented the “tip of the iceberg.”

This month’s CHSP release further refines the picture. One significant change this year is the CHSP research tracked homes in which at least one non-resident is an owner, instead of only counting those where a majority of owners were non-residents, as they did in the 2017 report.

It’s impossible to know now how the actual picture of property ownership changed between 2016 and today. But the image we have today is clearer, representing “an evolution of our understanding of this phenomenon,” said Eric Bond, a CMHC market analyst and one of the authors of this month’s report.

“There are data gaps in our knowledge of different phenomena in the housing market, so that’s why CMHC and Statistics Canada are looking to close those, so we can have an informed public discussions about these phenomena of interest,” Bond said this week. “We do strongly believe that the best decisions and debates are based on data and evidence, so that’s what we’re looking to provide.”

Around the time in 2016 when Siddall was citing his own agency’s research to play down the issue of foreign ownership, he was far from the only high-profile figure doing so. Many, like previous Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson, shifted their public positions on these issues in recent years.