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What a difference an election cycle makes. When Canadians last went to the polls in 2015 you would have had to scour the country to find someone willing to talk about a surtax on foreign nationals buying real estate.

Now, such taxes are just considered the right thing to do — by the federal Liberals, NDP and Greens. And B.C. has shown the way.

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How did this happen? Ignited by the public’s anger over the housing affordability crisis, the B.C. Liberals in 2016 surprised almost everyone by going against their own free-market ideology and suddenly imposed a 15-per-cent tax on foreign purchasers of housing in Metro Vancouver.

Many were shocked by this affront to economic globalization and investment. Property developers and their lobbyists, plus some activists and a handful of academics, claimed a foreign-buyers tax was xenophobic and even racist.

The foreign-buyers tax took some fuel out of Vancouver’s stratospheric housing prices, however. And polls show that people supported it. The next year, Ontario slapped a foreign-buyers tax on real estate in the Toronto region. And after the B.C. NDP narrowly won office in 2017, it hiked the surtax to 20 per cent and expanded it to Victoria and other cities.