International Trade committee  It applies to properties that are owned.... Rob, you can probably give a more comprehensive answer.

International Trade committee  Yes. The two main objectives of the tax.... I will read them again. It's to help ensure that foreign non-resident owners of underused Canadian housing pay their fair share of Canadian tax, with the revenues going to help support the government's investments to make housing more affordable, but also to help ensure that housing is made available for the use of Canadians.

International Trade committee  That's right. There was a lot of consideration given to making sure the tax didn't apply in situations in which it was unfair, so there are a series of exemptions. I can go through them all, but generally speaking the categories are that there are exemptions based on the occupant of the residential property if it's your primary place of residence, for example.

International Trade committee  I would be happy to, yes.

International Trade committee  Do you want to take that, Rob?

International Trade committee  I'm going to pass this to Rob Ives, because he is very familiar with the consultations and all the submissions received.

International Trade committee  The UHT is a brand new tax. We were hoping to have a consultation period and feedback. We received a fairly limited amount of feedback at the time. As I was saying, once the UHT form and the guidance came out, it suddenly hit people's radars, and we've received quite a bit of feedback since that time.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Chair. Thank you for having us. Good afternoon, my name is Amanda Riddell. I am the director of the real property and financial institutions section of the sales tax and excise division of the tax policy branch at Finance Canada. I'm here today to provide the committee with a brief overview of the federal underused housing tax, or UHT, which my section was tasked with developing by the government.

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question. I can only speak to the tax changes. I can't speak to the general risks that this new industry could potentially pose. I know that issue is being taken up by different parts of our department.

Finance committee  I can't say for sure what they're looking at, because I'm not in that part of the department. However, I know some colleagues elsewhere in the department are looking at it from a more holistic, systemic point of view, as opposed to just the narrow tax question, which is what I'm dealing with.

Finance committee  I think that's one way it could be put. We're faced with a difficulty, because there is no recipient, and GST relies on there being an identifiable recipient. The fact that there's not makes it impossible to charge GST. Is it appropriate to have no tax applied to the industry as a whole?

Finance committee  There are self-assessment rules throughout the act in all different sorts of situations. I would say that self-assessment is not our preferred approach in general, as a rule, just because the compliance rate is not as high—not surprisingly, as you might expect.

Finance committee  I think that's fair.

Finance committee  Oh, I thought I was done.

Finance committee  Do you mean that I complete the answer to the question that was originally asked by Mr. Chambers?