'My, oh my, how plainly the deceit reveals itself''

The good knee-jerk Dr. is at it again!  It's NOT deceit.  If a government intervenes in the marketplace suddenly, as the BC government has, then a whooole lot more than foreign-ownership deals collapse.  Would-be sellers simply sit on their hands to "see where this goes."  Potential buyers (including born-in-Vancouver and in-migration Canadians from everywhere outside the province) step back--(I'll wait until prices dive...")  Developers understand this (obviously the Dr. doesn't) and so they start scaling back work-in-progress and putting potential plans on the shelf.  And who knows what ELSE the government--and the civic government--has planned??  

The decline in foreign-ownership deals is just one ripple that goes out from the big foreign-tax boulder thrown in the real estate pond. And, as it certainly represents less than 15% of all deals at any given time (and a lot less now, of course) that is NOT  a very big ripple.