Ontario just got a big deal. BC wants in.

On March 30, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced a joint housing partnership that, among other things, removes the full 13% HST on newly built homes priced up to $1 million for one year. Above that, the relief doesn't vanish abruptly. The $130,000 maximum rebate is maintained on homes up to $1.5 million, then phases down proportionally, reaching a floor of $24,000 on homes priced at $1.85 million and above. The deal runs from April 1, 2026, to March 31, 2027, and it covers all buyers, not just first-timers. Investors who rent the unit out also qualify.

It's a dramatic move. And it's making BC's development industry very impatient.

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Ontario Moved. BC Is Still Talking.

The federal piece of this is Bill C-26, introduced March 26, 2026. It's a short piece of legislation that simply authorizes a one-time $1.7 billion transfer to provinces and territories to be used however they see fit, as long as the goal is increasing housing supply. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne has said the allocation will account for population and markets facing housing affordability challenges, but the specific formula for splitting funds among provinces hasn't been published. What's clear is that each province decides independently how to use its share.

The Ontario deal, funded partly through this mechanism, is the first example of what that flexibility looks like in practice. Ontario chose to use its share to wipe out the HST on new builds for a year. The province estimates this will trigger roughly 8,000 additional housing starts and contribute $2.7 billion to Ontario's GDP.

BC's Housing Minister Christine Boyle acknowledged the importance of the moment when speaking to press in Victoria. She said she was meeting with the federal housing minister "this week" to advance the conversation, and that "B.C. should be treated as well as Ontario has been." What BC will actually do with its share of federal funding remains publicly unresolved as of late March 2026.

Michael Drummond, interim president and CEO of the Urban Development Institute, said his members have been pushing for sales tax relief on new homes for over a year. The UDI wrote directly to the Prime Minister, copying the BC Premier, asking BC to get the same deal Ontario got. Ontario announced its HST measure on March 25, and Bill C-26, the federal legislation enabling that kind of provincial flexibility, was tabled the following day. Drummond described the language as broad enough that provinces have real flexibility, and the UDI is now waiting to hear what BC will do with it.

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The Market BC's Developers Are Actually Trying to Save

Before getting into what relief might look like, it helps to understand how bad the underlying market has become.

According to CMHC's Spring 2026 Housing Supply Report, Vancouver had the highest unsold condo inventory at completion among all major Canadian cities studied. Condo presales nationally have collapsed, and Metro Vancouver has been at the centre of that collapse. Wesgroup Properties CEO Beau Jarvis cited figures from Rennie Intelligence and Zonda Urban showing only 87 presale units sold across all of Metro Vancouver and Squamish in the first three months of 2026. That is not a typo.

The broader presale picture going into 2026 was already grim. 2025 saw fewer than 4,800 presale units released across the region, with an absorption rate of about 30%, making it one of the weakest years in over a decade. Approximately 3,500 completed units sat unsold across the province, according to figures cited in the Globe and Mail article this piece is based on. CMHC had been tracking roughly 2,500 unsold and empty new condos in Metro Vancouver since mid-2025, a number that has since grown.

The math behind this is structural, not cyclical. Urban Development Institute president Anne McMullin told CBC that it now costs more to build a condo unit than 80 percent of Metro Vancouver residents can afford to pay. Construction costs have roughly doubled over a decade. Development cost charges, which fund the infrastructure that comes with growth, have climbed steeply at the municipal level. And presale projects typically need 60 to 80 percent of units committed before a lender will fund construction, which means stalled sales translate directly into stalled projects.

The downstream risk of all this is not just a quiet market. BCREA has warned that if construction continues to slow and demand eventually returns, the lack of supply could drive BC home prices up by 27 percent by 2032. The same pattern played out after 2008. Low demand collapsed the pipeline, and when demand returned, prices spiked hard. A recovery now, without sufficient housing in the ground, sets up a repeat.

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What BC Buyers and Developers Are Actually Asking For

The GST situation in BC is already more complicated than it appears at first glance.

Earlier in 2026, Bill C-4 received Royal Assent, eliminating the federal GST for first-time buyers on newly built homes priced up to $1 million. The maximum savings is $50,000. First-time buyers can now claim that rebate through the CRA for purchase agreements signed on or after March 20, 2025. That's real money, and it matters for the buyers who qualify.

But first-time buyers are a small slice of the new condo market, and developers are the first to say so. Kevin Layden, president and CEO of Wesbild, explained it plainly: most presale condos won't be completed for three to four years. That time horizon makes owner-occupiers hesitant. Investors have historically been the ones willing to commit early, because they're not trying to live somewhere that doesn't exist yet. They're providing the capital that allows a project to secure financing and break ground. Without that investor base engaged, projects don't get built.

What the UDI wants is to broaden the GST relief beyond first-time buyers to all purchasers, including investors who intend to rent the unit out. The Ontario deal, notably, already includes that. The HST removal in Ontario applies to any eligible new home regardless of whether the buyer has owned before, and qualifying rental properties are also covered.

On the provincial side, Wesbild's Layden also pointed to the BC Property Transfer Tax as a lever the province could pull independently of the federal deal. The PTT on a $1 million home runs to around $18,000. BC's newly built home exemption already eliminates the PTT for eligible buyers on new builds up to $1.1 million, but that exemption requires the buyer to occupy the property as a principal residence. Investors and non-owner-occupiers don't qualify. Expanding or restructuring that program is a separate conversation from the federal GST, and one the province could have on its own timeline.

Matthew McClenaghan, president of Edgar Development, summed up the frustration of many in the industry: the problems are not new, and no single policy change fixes them. High taxes, escalating development cost charges, complicated building codes, and slow approvals have layered on top of each other for years. Getting BC to match Ontario's approach would help. But it wouldn't be enough on its own.

Development cost charges remain one of the most stubborn cost drivers for new housing in BC. Ontario's deal with Ottawa also addresses this, with a combined $8.8 billion committed over 10 years to fund infrastructure and allow municipalities to cut development charges by up to 50 percent for three years. There is no equivalent BC-specific arrangement announced yet, though Minister Boyle acknowledged that reducing development charge pressure is part of the active conversation with Ottawa.

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What This Means If You're Buying or Selling Now

If you're a first-time buyer shopping for a newly built home in BC, the federal GST rebate is already available to you. The math on a $700,000 new build, for example, is $35,000 back in your pocket. That's not nothing. Pair that with the FHSA and RRSP Home Buyers' Plan and the savings stack meaningfully.

If you're a repeat buyer or an investor, the federal rebate doesn't currently apply to you in BC. Whether BC negotiates something comparable to Ontario's deal over the next few weeks or months is genuinely uncertain. Minister Boyle's language suggests the province understands the stakes. The UDI is pushing hard. But BC has not committed to a specific mechanism or timeline.

For sellers of existing homes, the connection is indirect but real. A stalled presale market and collapsed new construction pipeline means less competition from new supply in the short term. But it also means the longer-term supply crunch deepens, which is exactly what the BCREA warned about. A market that doesn't build enough now will have a very different price story in 2028 and beyond.

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If you're trying to make sense of how any of this affects your specific situation, whether you're buying new, selling existing, or holding investment property, it helps to talk through the numbers with someone who knows the local market. The team at Coldwell Banker Horizon Realty works across the Okanagan and stays current on exactly these kinds of policy shifts. Reach out and we'll give you a straight answer.