I hear that.
In this case, what's surprising to me is that it's an exemption that would allow for people—who are not Canadian citizens or residents in Canada—to have a home and to leave a property vacant for 11 months of the year, or even more. It's 48 weeks of the year. It really seems to undercut the purpose of the tax.
In this case, what's surprising to me is that this exemption seems so far removed from the point of the tax, which is presumably to charge non-citizens and non-residents for having property that's unoccupied for most of the year. Here, the government is saying it's already contemplating an exemption that would allow people who are leaving properties unoccupied for 11 months of the year or more to not have to pay the tax.
That goes beyond a regulatory power to fix interpretive differences. It's really a regulatory power to undermine the policy objective of the tax.