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The leader of Projet Montreal, the city’s main municipal opposition party, has said she’s worried there will be a rush of outside buyers into the marketplace. Valerie Plante plans to fight the next municipal election on getting power from the province to impose a tax.

Carlos Leitao, the Quebec finance minister, said his department was monitoring whether the tax from neighbouring Ontario will have a spillover effect on the Montreal market. “We just want to be prepared that if it needs to be done then we can do it quickly, but I don’t have any plans to do anything in the short-term,” he told the Canadian Press this month.

The tax, along with 15 other measures to cool the market in southern Ontario, may already be having an impact. The Toronto Real Estate Board reported Monday that May sales were off 20.3 per cent from a year ago in the Greater Toronto Area while average prices dipped 6.2 per cent from April.

The QFREB published an economic analysis at the end of last month and noted the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. proportion of foreign buyers in Montréal was estimated at only 1.5 per cent.

“In Montréal, the presence of foreign buyers would be limited mainly to certain central neighbourhoods for single-family homes and to the downtown area for condominiums. Activity by these buyers in the Montréal area could have an upward impact on property prices in some central neighbourhoods, as this is where they tend to concentrate their purchases,” wrote Paul Cardinal, director of analysis with the federation. “The impact would be limited given that Montréal’s real estate market conditions are very different from those observed recently in Toronto and Vancouver.”