Twenty-six developers, one Premier

IThe room where the letter was drafted

By July 29, 2025, twenty-six of British Columbia's largest housing developers, along with the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association, had signed a single open letter. They sent it to the Prime Minister of Canada, the federal Minister of Housing, the Premier of British Columbia, the BC Minister of Housing, and the former BC Housing Minister now serving as Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth.

The title of the letter was "Crisis & Revitalization of the Real Estate / Construction Industry in BC." The signers included Beedie Living, Polygon Homes, Cressey Group, Wall Financial, Amacon, Intracorp, Wesbild, Westbank, Mosaic, Strand Development, Edgar Development, GMC Projects, Bonnis Properties, Pooni Group, Persis, Abstract Developments, Ascend Projects, Contour Developments, Enrich Developments, Executive Group, Infinity Group, PATH Developments, Weathervane Real Estate and several others — a substantial share of every new condominium tower visible from a Vancouver rooftop in the last decade is on that list.

They were not asking for the foreign-buyer ban to be rescinded. They were asking for what is now broadly known as the Australia 2025 model: keep the ban on existing dwellings, but reopen new construction and presales to foreign capital. "While we understand that the ban was implemented to protect housing supply for Canadians," the letter read, "it has unfortunately impacted the construction of new homes, as an unintended consequence."

Within seventy-two hours, the Premier of British Columbia said no.

IIThe Premier's no

David Eby did not arrive in BC politics through real estate. He arrived through it.

From 2005 to 2008, Eby worked at the Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where he ran cases on police accountability, drug policy, and housing justice. From 2008 to 2012, he was the Executive Director of the BC Civil Liberties Association — the organization that has, since 1962, served as the principal civil-liberties watchdog in the province, and the same organization Michael Audain had been instrumental in founding nearly half a century earlier.

In 2013, Eby was elected MLA for Vancouver–Point Grey, defeating sitting Premier Christy Clark in her own riding. In 2017, John Horgan appointed him Attorney General. He commissioned the Peter German money-laundering reviews and then the Cullen Commission, which concluded in June 2022 that Canada's anti-money-laundering regime had been "not effective." In November 2022, he became Premier. Since then, his government has passed Bill 44 (ending single-family-only zoning province-wide), Bill 47 (mandating 104 Transit-Oriented Development Areas across 31 municipalities), and launched the BC Builds middle-income rental program. The province's own analysis projects 216,000 to 293,000 net new housing units over the resulting ten years.

Eby's response came at a Vancouver news conference on Wednesday, July 30, 2025, the day after the letter landed. Frances Bula's reporting in the Globe and Mail captured the Premier saying "the old system resulted in a glut of empty housing owned by offshore buyers." The Canadian Mortgage Professional account of the same news conference captures the verbatim:

And:

He took aim, by name, at downtown Vancouver's troubled Curv project, whose proposed price escalated from $16 million to $69 million after international investment came in, calling the old model "completely stupid and disconnected from what the local market can support."

His Housing Minister, Christine Boyle — a Vancouver City Councillor with the progressive OneCity slate from 2018 to 2024, an ordained United Church minister, an MLA since 2024 — added the line that made the headlines: "We are not going back to the Wild West days of empty condos, and foreign investment racking up the prices."

The twenty-six developers, Audain's Polygon among them, had received a polite, public, and unambiguous refusal within seventy-two hours.

IIIWho's actually asking

To understand what the developers were asking for, it helps to know who at least two of them are.

Keith Beedie founded the company that became Beedie in 1954, building single-family homes in suburban Vancouver that sold, then, for about $12,000 each. He died in 2017. His son Ryan Beedie joined the firm in 1993 and became President in 2001, expanding into Ontario, Alberta, and Nevada and launching Beedie Living — the residential arm — under the broader Beedie corporate umbrella. The company is, today, the largest private industrial landowner in Western Canada: 172 properties across 16 million square feet, 375 tenants. Family philanthropy is substantial: the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University was named after a major Keith Beedie gift; the Beedie Luminaries program, founded by Ryan, distributes scholarships to BC students facing adversity. Ryan Beedie holds the Order of British Columbia.

Michael Audain joined Polygon Properties Limited in September 1980 as Executive Vice President and partner; he became President in 1988 and has been Chairman since 1992. He was born in Bournemouth, England, on July 31, 1937. As a UBC student in the early 1960s he led peace marches on campus through the university's Nuclear Disarmament Club. In the summer of 1961, he joined the Freedom Riders in the American South; he was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi on June 7, 1961, and sentenced to a jail term and a $250 fine for protesting segregation. He was instrumental in founding the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association in 1962, together with a group of UBC faculty — the BCCLA's first executive meeting was held in his Kitsilano apartment. Polygon has, since 1980, built more than 33,000 homes across the Lower Mainland. Day-to-day operations have been run since 2003 by President and CEO Neil Chrystal, with Polygon since 1987.

Audain's broader philanthropy is unusually visible for a BC developer. In November 2021 he and the Audain Foundation pledged $100 million toward the new Vancouver Art Gallery — the largest single cash gift any Canadian art gallery has ever received. He opened the Audain Art Museum in Whistler on March 12, 2016. The Audain Foundation was established in 1997. He holds both the Order of Canada (2009) and the Order of British Columbia (2007).

The President of one of the signatory companies, Wesbild's Kevin Layden, described the BC residential market on the record as "worse than the 2008 global financial crisis," warning: "If projects don't go forward, there will be an inventory decline in two to three years … that will drive prices back up."

The Beedie and Audain names — not just as developers but as philanthropic institutions — were two of the twenty-six on the letter. The letter was not, in its tone or its sources, a complaint from the margins of the industry. It was a coordinated request from the centre.

IVThe mechanism

The case the twenty-six developers are making rests on a single mechanical fact about how concrete towers get built in British Columbia. Construction lenders — the senior tranche is usually a major bank, increasingly a non-bank like KingSett or Romspen — will not release the construction loan unless the developer can show, through signed presale contracts, that approximately 60 to 80 percent of the units are already pre-sold.

That presale threshold is, in the developer letter's argument, the binding constraint. It is also, in Canada, the unusual point of policy intervention. The Canadian foreign-buyer ban is one of the only such regimes in the world that extends to presales. Australia's April 2025 update keeps the ban on existing dwellings but explicitly permits foreign capital into new construction and build-to-rent. New Zealand's December 2025 amendment opened a narrow exemption for Active Investor Plus visa-holders at properties valued above NZ$5 million. Singapore taxes foreign buyers heavily but does not bar them. Canada is the outlier.

When the foreign-capital tranche was removed from the presale market, the developers' argument runs, presale velocity fell. When presale velocity fell, the 60-to-80-percent threshold stopped being met. When the threshold stopped being met, construction financing didn't unlock. When financing didn't unlock, projects didn't break ground. In Q1 2025, Metro Vancouver had 152 new concrete-tower presale launches. In Q1 2026, it had zero — per Zonda Home Canada via Business in Vancouver. CMHC's BC housing-start series shows the same compression on the delivery side: roughly a 50-percent drop in BC monthly starts between early 2024 and early 2025.

In the Lower Mainland, several developers have already chosen the off-ramp. Tangerine Developments flipped Phase 1 of its two-tower project at 10054 Whalley Boulevard in Surrey — a 33-storey, 379-unit tower next to King George SkyTrain Station — from condominium to purpose-built rental in 2025. Tangerine's explanation cited "the current state of the real estate market, specifically presales." Wesgroup converted a 294-unit condominium tower in New Westminster — branded "The Nelson" — to purpose-built rental, financed by a $135-million CMHC loan. Wesgroup also outright cancelled the 204-unit Ardea project at Vancouver's River District. Brivia Group's Curv at 1075 Nelson Street — a 60-storey tower planned as 357 strata units plus 176 purpose-built rental — went into receivership in July 2025 with $91.2 million owed to an RBC-led lending syndicate, having never broken ground.

VThe Australia model in practice

The Australian comparator the developers are pointing at is more nuanced than "Australia allows foreign buyers." Australia's April 2025 framework runs for two years (through March 2027) and is paired with the highest foreign-buyer tax regime in the world.

A foreign buyer purchasing a $1-million new apartment in Melbourne under the April 2025 rules pays:

• standard Victorian stamp duty of approximately $55,000,
• plus a foreign-buyer surcharge of approximately $80,000 (Victoria's surcharge is 8 percent; NSW raised theirs to 9 percent on January 1, 2025),
• plus a non-refundable Foreign Investment Review Board application fee starting at AUD $14,100 for sub-$1M residential properties (FY 2025-26),
• plus an annual surcharge land tax (5 percent in NSW, 4 percent in Victoria, 3 percent in Queensland on properties over a low threshold),
• plus doubled vacancy fees for any unit held empty more than half the year.

In a Melbourne apartment, that's $135,000 in upfront tax before the buyer takes possession, plus several thousand annually thereafter. Australia did not simply re-open foreign capital. It re-priced it.

The Australian framework also includes a specific carveout for Build-to-Rent (BTR) institutional investment — large-scale rental portfolios held by pension funds and REITs as long-term rental assets rather than strata-sold individual condominiums. This is the structural reform Eby and Boyle's BC Builds program reaches at from a different angle: the explicit goal is to grow long-term rental supply, not to grow strata-titled investor-owned condominium supply.

VIThe case against the developer letter

The argument against the developers' position is not that they're lying about the housing-starts numbers, which are real. It is that the foreign-buyer ban's contribution to those numbers is smaller than the letter implies, and that reopening foreign capital risks the same inflation cycle in new-construction prices the original ban was meant to interrupt.

The leading expression of this argument is a 2025 essay by Nidhi Verma, a Canadian law student, which won the Canadian Bar Association's Real Property Section Law School Essay Contest. Verma's piece — "Closing the Door: Evaluating the Impact of Foreign Buyers Ban" — cites CMHC data putting foreign ownership at roughly one percent of Canadian housing stock. This is consistent with CMHC's own pre-policy estimate, made public in 2023, that the federal ban would affect approximately two percent of purchases. Verma concludes the policy is "fundamentally ineffective and counterproductive" — symbolically powerful, materially marginal, and that the affordability levers that actually matter are zoning, transit-oriented density, accelerated approvals, and interest rates.

A second public letter, signed by twenty-seven academic urbanists and housing economists on August 15, 2025, adds a third position to the debate. The urbanists do not back the developer letter — they ask Eby and Boyle to go further in opposite directions on different fronts. Specifically, they critique Bill 44 and Bill 47 for "inflating land values, massive speculation, demovictions and displacement, while creating the wrong kind of supply that is mostly small expensive units in oversized market towers." Their argument is that the structural production constraint cannot be unlocked by foreign capital OR by upzoning alone; it requires direct public investment in non-market housing. Foreign capital is not their preoccupation — which kind of supply gets built is. The existence of the urbanist letter is a useful reminder that "developers want X; Premier wants Y" is not the whole map of where BC's housing debate actually sits.

And the politics, separately from the policy, are unambiguous. A 2025 Research Co. survey put public support for the federal ban at 76 percent of Canadians. The political cost of repealing it outright is high.

VIIThe federal signal

In December 2025, federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson — Vancouver's mayor from 2008 to 2018, the founder of Happy Planet juice before politics, and a longtime ally of the BC NDP — told Bloomberg and The Logic that Ottawa was reviewing the ban with reference to international comparators, "particularly Australia." The working framework he described — foreign buyers permitted to purchase new construction and vacant land, but barred from existing homes — is, almost word-for-word, the framework the twenty-six developers asked for.

Robertson did not announce a policy. He signalled one. The political effect of the signal is that the most likely shape of the 2027 federal decision is no longer a binary "renew or repeal" — it is a quiet conversion to the Australia model, branded as supply policy rather than ban-rollback. The developer letter has, in other words, almost certainly already won the first round of the policy fight at the federal level, even as it lost the BC provincial round to Eby within seventy-two hours.

Whether Ottawa actually pulls the trigger is the second question. Whether BC's provincial 20-percent foreign-buyer transfer tax and the speculation-and-vacancy tax stay in place — Eby has been unambiguous that they will — is the third. The combination of those answers, by mid-2026, will determine whether new BC presale supply unlocks in 2027 or sits frozen into the back end of the decade.

VIIIWhere this lands

Both sides of this debate are arguing in good faith. The twenty-six developer signatories are not asking to reopen the speculative-empty-unit channel that drove the 2014–2021 narrative; they are asking for a model that other comparable economies have already adopted, paired with surcharges and vacancy taxes that would dwarf anything Canada has tried. The political opponents of that ask are not denying the supply-side math; they are saying any policy that re-admits foreign capital into the market needs the guardrails that protect occupancy and rental-stock growth, which the original 2017 BC tax-side regime did not adequately do.

Underneath the names — Beedie, Audain, Eby — sits a real question: whether BC's 2026 housing crisis is best addressed by re-opening foreign capital into new construction, or by accepting a four-year supply pause and routing all new units through the purpose-built rental track on CMHC's MLI Select financing. There is a credible answer in both directions. The choice will sit in Ottawa, with the Carney government, sometime before January 1, 2027.

It is worth following the signal — and watching, especially, the gap between what Premier Eby says publicly and what federal Housing Minister Robertson says quietly to reporters. They are, for the moment, the two ends of a sentence the Carney government has not yet finished.

Sixty-four years ago Michael Audain was instrumental in founding the BC Civil Liberties Association. Fourteen years ago David Eby was its Executive Director. They've ended up, in mid-2026, on opposite sides of the most consequential BC housing-policy fight of the decade. Both of them know each other's institution. Neither, presumably, is surprised the other is on the side they are.

This piece pairs with the four-year contour line: same story, from the market-mechanics side rather than the policy fight.