Like the hundreds of other Americans who own cottages in Canada, Robert Ketteman is facing a big new bill courtesy of the Canadian government, and his bill may be worse than many. Thanks to a new tax on what the Canadian government calls “underused property,” the costs of operating the Ketteman family’s longtime summer home could nearly triple.
And that “would likely force us to make the heartbreaking decision to sell something that has been a central part of my family’s life for over a century,” Ketteman, of Williamsville, told Canadian lawmakers at a parliamentary hearing last week. “It will simply become unaffordable to keep. And my story is just one of hundreds in the Fort Erie area and, I would guess, thousands across Canada.”
Explaining the situation via video to the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade, Ketteman encountered something he never before came across from Canadian officials in nearly a year and a half of fighting Canada’s new underused property tax: a sympathetic ear. Hearing that the new tax is likely to drive away American homeowners from Crystal Beach and other vacation communities near the border, several Canadian lawmakers expressed interest in changes to the law that could exempt a class of homeowners who appear to be accidentally subject to the tax.
“It seems that there is a solution there to be found,” Tony Baldinelli, the Conservative member of Parliament from Niagara Falls, Ont., who called for the hearings, said afterward.
“I am optimistic, in fact, that they will make changes,” said Richard Halinda, a lawyer from Fort Erie who, like Ketteman and Baldinelli, spoke at the hearings.
“Finally, someone is listening,” Ketteman said as he concluded his testimony on Thursday.
Ketteman and other Americans who own property just across the border in Canada find themselves victims of a law that aims to stabilize the sky-high housing prices of Toronto, Vancouver and…
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